Surrender
by Marcus S. Lazarus
Summary: When the TARDIS materialised in the middle of Martha's wedding, she never expected to find herself facing a race against time to save the Doctor's life
1. I’d Give Up Forever to Touch You

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters you recognise; usual drill

Feedback: Feel free

Surrender

As Martha Jones stood in front of the mirror, taking one last check-over of her hair and make-up in preparation for the ceremony, she couldn't help but feel more than slightly ambivalent about the current situation.

She knew that the wedding would take place in less than an hour, and she already knew that most of the guests were here- some of her old friends from her student days, assorted UNIT colleagues, her family-, but there was still a few people she _hadn't _heard from.

The Torchwood staff were one thing, of course- with them being responsible for the Rift it was only natural they might have trouble guaranteeing 'time off'-, but she would have thought that _he _could have made the effort…

"Looking as fantastic as ever, Doctor Jones, huh?" a familiar voice suddenly said from behind her.

"Jack!" Martha said, turning to smile at her friend and fellow former companion, already crossing three people off her 'list'; if Jack was here, it could be a fair bet that Gwen and Ianto were as well. "You made it!"

"Well, we've got the Hub programmed to alert us the second anything… odd… happens back at the office, so we figured we could spare a few hours for this," Jack replied, shrugging nonchalantly as he smiled at her, before his expression became more solemn. "Have you seen… _him_?"

"Never even called back," Martha replied, shaking her head with a casual nonchalance that felt forced even to her; she just prayed that it wasn't as obvious to her old friend. "I left a few messages letting him know the date, but he hasn't even texted a response."

"Really?" Jack said, looking uncertainly at her for a moment before he shrugged. "Well, you know the Doctor; for all we know he could have just dropped in on us already as far as he's concerned."

"Maybe…" Martha admitted, nodding slightly, unable to stop the slight twinge on her face at the thought that the Doctor had decided not to come.

What _was _it with that man these days? Everything had been fine between them since the Sontaran incident- the Doctor still came to her now and again to talk about Donna and Jenny when he could; he'd told her more than once that he'd wished she could have spent more time with the daughter he'd only had for such a brief time-, but ever since his last visit, when she'd mentioned that her wedding was coming up and asked the Doctor to come, he'd just clammed up, claimed that he had something vital to do somewhere else, headed back to the TARDIS, and left.

Every attempt Martha had made to try and get through to him since then had been met with nothing but her old answerphone- even after that incident with the wormhole and that bus she'd heard about the Doctor had left before she could get there-, leaving her with no real idea whether the Doctor was genuinely busy somewhere and hadn't heard the phone or simply decided not to answer it…

Shaking that thought off, Martha smiled once more at Jack in thanks and turned her attention back to the mirror, trying not to feel too hurt about the fact that, once again, the Doctor had something _else _to do that was more important than her.

He had a whole universe to travel and explore that would always matter more to him than the feelings of someone who'd just been a replacement for who he really wanted to be there…

She was over him, and that was that.

Maybe if she told herself that enough times, she'd finally believe it…

* * *

An hour later, the Doctor still conspicuous by his absence and the rest of the guests becoming impatient, Martha knew that she couldn't hold off on the ceremony any more. Taking one last check-over of her dress- a long white one with off-the-shoulder sleeves and a long veil-, Martha stepped out of her dressing room to join her father, the two subsequently walking down the aisle past all the assorted guests.

Martha even noticed the Torchwood Three- as she'd come to think of them following the 'death' (If it could be considered that in Owen's case seeing as he was _already _dead) of Owen and Tosh- sitting near the middle of the church- Gwen's husband had been busy with work-, but the continued absence of the man who'd so changed her

For a moment, as she stood in front of Tom, Martha once again briefly found herself thinking of another man, with thicker brown hair and more clean-shaven, but shook that thought off, momentarily disgusted with herself at her own weakness.

She was doing the right thing- the _healthy _thing- and had moved on; getting lost in the past- even if a part of herself would _always _love the last of the Time Lords- would only cause her more pain.

Even if a part of her would always… care for… the Doctor, he didn't see her that way; she'd _had _to get out of the TARDIS before it became impossible to do so or she embarrassed herself in such a manner as to ruin whatever friendships she and the Doctor might have been able to retain.

"Dearly beloved-" the priest began, only to be suddenly cut off by the wheezing, groaning sound that Martha had first heard in a dark alleyway opposite a pub so many long years ago.

"Oh no…" she muttered, turning to look incredulously at the aisle in the middle of the church, where the familiar form of a police box was already fading into view. "He _didn't_…"

As soon as the police box solidified in the middle of the aisle, Martha was already standing in front of it, hands on her hips as she glared at the door before her.

"Doctor," she said, her voice a low growl as she stared at the TARDIS, ignoring the confused stares from those guests who didn't know what the box meant to her, "if this is your idea of getting to the wedding _on time_, you've _definitely _got another thing coming! You don't even bother to call, you show up _right _in the middle of it…"

Her voice trailed off as she realised that she'd been standing outside the door after the ship had fully materialised for the better part of a minute, and nobody had come out yet.

Martha knew from experience that the TARDIS wouldn't materialise until the Doctor ordered it to- even if he sometimes got the coordinates wrong the ship had always stayed in the Time Vortex until the Doctor had _wanted _it to return to the 'main' universe-, which meant that the Doctor _was _in the control room…

So what was _taking _him so long to come out?

Martha didn't even stop to think about this might look; reaching up to her neck, she pulled out her old TARDIS key where it still hung on its string- she'd been wearing it to cover her 'something old'; given that it was the key to the ship of a nine hundred year old Time Lord it seemed like the oldest thing she _could_ own-, inserted it in the lock, and walked straight into the TARDIS.

The sight that met her was something she'd never expected to see; not only was the console room dark, illuminated only by the emergency lighting and the faintest glow from the console, but the Doctor was lying on the floor, apparently having fallen to the ground just after he finished setting the coordinates, his suit and coat badly burned and his face red and blistered as though something had exploded near his face.

"Oh my God…" Martha whispered in shock, all thought of anger at the Doctor forgotten; his condition didn't look too serious, but she had a strong suspicion that he wouldn't have come here looking like this if it was something he could handle himself.

Even as she hurried over to examine him, she barely registered the sound of the door opening behind her, checking the Doctor's heartbeats- the right one seemed to be a bit faster than was usual for some reason- before she glanced up in time to see Jack, Gwen and Ianto standing over her, Ianto locking the door and Gwen staring around herself in more-than-slight surprise while Jack hurried up to the TARDIS console, quickly flicking a few switches and setting the Time Rotor in motion.

"What-?" Martha began, glaring at Jack before the man raised a hand to stop her.

"We're not going anywhere; I just remembered something the Doctor did once when I first knew him and put the TARDIS in temporal orbit," he explained, evidently guessing her immediate concern was going anywhere with the Doctor in this state.

"Temporal what?" Gwen asked, looking in confusion at Jack.

"Basically, the TARDIS is currently going _back _in time at the same rate that time's going _forward _around it; as far as anyone out there's concerned, we could be in here for months and leave here a minute after entering it," Jack explained, shrugging slightly as he looked at Martha. "I figured it was the best way to avoid having to give too many awkward answers to anybody here who doesn't know about the Doctor; we can maybe say he's an amateur illusionist who was trying something new as a wedding present…"

Jack's voice trailed off as his gaze followed Martha's down to the Doctor's still body, his subsequent discomfort saying all that Martha needed to know; if they didn't work out what had happened to the Doctor, there was a possibility they'd _never _be able to provide a cover story for his presence.

"OK," Martha said, automatically taking control of the situation- she just wished that she wasn't wearing her wedding dress for this; it didn't exactly give the most effective impression-, "Ianto, Gwen, help me get the Doctor to the TARDIS medical bay- just take him through that door and the TARDIS should direct you the rest of way-; Jack, check the databanks and see if you can find anything about where the Doctor was before he came here-"

"Particularly anything about what might be causing his current problem; gotcha," Jack said, nodding as he walked over to stand by the TARDIS console even as Gwen and Ianto moved to pick up the Doctor. "I'll get back to you as soon as I can."

* * *

A few minutes later, as the Doctor lay on a bed in the TARDIS medical bay, Martha could only stare in frustration at the readings on the scanner before her; the Doctor had given her a few lessons in working the medical equipment in the ship when they had a few long trips in the TARDIS, but she still had a bit of trouble understanding much beyond the basics.

"Anything?" Gwen asked, looking uncertainly at Martha.

"Well, according to this, _physically _the Doctor's fine," Martha said, grateful that the scanners operated with 'Time Lord' as their default setting; at least it saved her having to worry about how to calibrate the system. "He's a bit tired, and the burns are an issue, but it's nothing serious; the only _real _problem seems to be that his brain activity's a bit lower than normal, and that's probably because of whatever's happening to him…"

"Which ties in with what I just found in the databanks," Jack said as he walked into the medical bay, his tone grim as he looked over at Martha. "The TARDIS's last destination was the Kaluran Collective during the Psycho-Wars."

"The what wars?" Gwen asked, looking at Jack in confusion.

"The war between the Kaluran Collective- a seriously totalitarian regime in around the thirty-third century; covered a sizeable chunk of this galaxy- and any telepathic-based species in their territory; they had a dangerous prejudice against psychics after this group called the Brotherhood nearly took over Earth's Empire near the end of the thirtieth century," Jack explained, looking at the Doctor with a solemn gaze that Martha didn't like the look of. "The Doctor apparently managed to help trigger the revolt that toppled the Collective… but just before he departed he was attacked by a member of the Higher Collective, who managed to hit him with a viral bomb that infected him with the psyche-worm virus."

"I'm guessing that's not a good thing?" Ianto asked.

"You got it," Jack said, looking over at Martha as though wanting to ensure she understood what he was about to tell her. "The virus was developed for specific use against telepaths; having infiltrated the Doctor's mind through his telepathic receptors, it's currently draining and absorbing his neural energy to sustain itself, moving from one part of his brain to another until there's nothing left for it to absorb. By the time it's done…"

He took a deep breath, clearly shaken at the thought of what he was about to say, before he finished his original sentence. "The Doctor will be completely brain-dead."

_Brain dead_…

Martha almost couldn't picture it.

It just seemed to be a total contradiction; the Doctor, _brain-dead_? The man that had come up with so many inspirational plans and brilliant comments, who had touched so many lives and witnessed so many wonders across all of time and space, reduced to a simple lump of flesh that required artificial means simply to _breathe_…

He _couldn't _end like _that_!

"No…" she said, looking up at Jack in protest; she might not like the idea of the alternative- she'd only skimmed over the details about regeneration available in UNIT files; it had always seemed like something she'd prefer to ask the Doctor about herself rather than learn about from second-hand information-, but if it meant the Doctor lived she'd try anything. "He'll pull through; all he has to do is that… regeneration thing and it'll… it'll _erase_ the virus from his system-"

"Based on what I've read about this thing- and about regeneration-, that won't help," Jack said, shaking his head. "The virus has already spread too deeply into his mind; if the Doctor regenerated, the resulting release of neural energy in his brain as his mind rebuilt itself would just allow the virus to finish the job by making it easier for it to access the rest of his mind at an accelerated rate. Even if the Doctor survived long enough to regenerate all the way, his next incarnation would be virtually brain-dead- if it wasn't _actually _brain-dead- as a result of the neural tissue devoured by the virus, and the damage done would make it impossible to try and use the TARDIS to restore his memories because there'd be nothing left to restore them _to_."

He paused, clearly unable to believe what he was about to say, before he looked back at Martha. "It might take him hours or minutes- even with how quickly this virus apparently spreads it could be a day at most when you take the complexity of his brain into account-, but the Doctor _is _going to die."


	2. I Don’t Want The World To See Me

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters you recognise; usual drill

Feedback: Feel free

Surrender

_The Doctor is going to die_…

Martha tried repeating that sentence in her head, but it didn't make it any easier for her to process; the concept of the Doctor being _dead _just… didn't _work_!

"No…" she protested, looking desperately at Jack. "He doesn't… he _can't_… There has to be _something _we can do!"

"Couldn't this ship do… something for him?" Gwen asked, indicating the TARDIS with an uncertain wave of her hand. "I mean, if the people who made it were these… big-shot time travellers…"

"That's the thing," Jack said, shaking his head slightly as he looked at his team. "According to the databanks, there _is _a way for the Doctor to be cured of this virus… but it looks like he didn't use it."

Martha's eyes widened.

There was no _way _that what Jack was implying was accurate…

"You're saying… the Doctor's _letting _himself die?" she asked, shaking her head as she glared at Jack. "I don't buy it; if he'd _wanted _to die, why would he come _here_? He _knows _that we'd try to save him-"

"There's a difference between _trying _to save someone and being _able _to save someone," Jack said, exchanging glances with Gwen and Ianto that made it fairly clear that was one area he wasn't willing to discuss further. "Maybe… he just wanted to be sure he was found by someone who'd be able to… bury him-"

Jack was cut off mid-sentence by a powerful slap from Martha, prompting Gwen and Ianto to stare incredulously at her as she glared at the immortal time agent.

"If you even _think _about finishing that sentence," Martha said, glaring at Jack as he stared at her in disbelief, "I'll take you back to this living sun the Doctor and I visited once and _leave _you there; understood?"

"Uh… check," Jack said nodding slightly at Martha, clearly dazed by the unexpectedness of the slap.

"Good," Martha said, nodding briefly before she folded her arms in an attempt to regain a more professional stance. "So, what _could _the Doctor have done?"

"Well… the only real cure for this virus is for the Doctor to download it into the TARDIS telepathic circuits-" Jack began.

"The _ship _is telepathic?" Gwen asked, looking incredulously at Jack.

"Hang on; the cure for this thing would transfer the virus to the _TARDIS_?" Martha repeated, matching Gwen's incredulous stare at Jack. "But-"

"The virus couldn't actually _infect _the TARDIS; it would be like expecting an insect to get a cold, the TARDIS is just wired too differently from _any _kind of brain for the virus to effectively do any kind of damage to it," Jack explained (Martha was rapidly beginning to contemplate hitting Jack again; even if it couldn't do anything permanent to him, maybe _that _would make him hurry up). "According to the databanks, after it takes the virus into itself the TARDIS should be able to essentially 'purge' the virus into the Time Vortex while absorbing some fragments of vortex energy to heal the Doctor's damaged brain tissue…"

"But?" Martha asked, waving a hand promptingly at Jack; for a Time Agent, he seemed to be taking a ridiculous amount of time to get to the _point_.

"But… as I said, the Doctor has to _choose _to transmit the virus into the TARDIS," Jack said, looking increasingly uncomfortable as he looked at Martha. "The fact that he chose to set the coordinates to take the TARDIS here rather than just curing himself where he was…"

He swallowed. "We have to face the fact that he might not _want _to be saved this time around-"

"_No_," Martha retorted, looking at Jack with the kind of cold fury he hadn't seen on her face even when she was yelling at the Master over her phone for capturing her family. "I did _not _walk _all _over the _planet _for that man just for him to give up now; there _has _to be a way to get him to send that… _thing_ out of his head!"

"Couldn't we try and… _program_ the TARDIS to take the virus itself?" Ianto asked, looking uncertainly at Jack. "I mean, it's probably advanced enough…"

"The TARDIS's ability to take on the virus isn't the problem here; the Doctor's willingness to _let _the TARDIS do that is," Jack countered, shaking his head before he paused, a slight smile crossing his face as he turned to look at the still-unconscious Time Lord. "Unless…?"

"What?" Gwen asked, looking curiously at the immortal ex-Time Agent.

"I _think _I have an idea…" Jack said, the slight smile becoming broader as he looked at the Doctor.

* * *

"I'm sorry; could you repeat that?" Martha asked, looking in increasing incredulity at Jack as the two of them stood in the TARDIS console room, the still-unconscious Doctor in Jack's arms as Gwen and Ianto waited outside; Jack had stated that he'd prefer it if he and Martha had some privacy for what they were about to attempt. "You want _me _to go into his head and… _give him a pep talk_?"

"It's the only thing that might work," Jack replied, assuming what Martha had come to think of as his 'I'm-a-captain-and-I'm-giving-you-an-order' stance (Possibly one of the few poses Jack had that _didn't _involve a sexual connotation of some sort, now that Martha thought about it). "The virus can only be released into the TARDIS if the Doctor _wants _to release it, and since he's definitely in no condition to do it consciously, the only other option is to use the telepathic circuits to send someone _into _his mind to convince him to do it _sub_consciously-"

"Right, I get that, but why _me_?" Martha asked, indicating herself. "I mean, I'm willing to _help _him, but wouldn't someone else-?"

"It's got to be you, Martha," Jack said, shaking his head as he looked apologetically at her. "Gwen and Ianto don't know him well enough to really know how to get through to him, we might not have time to find one of his older companions before the virus spreads too far to be treated, and as for me…"

He shrugged. "She may not be going flying off to the end of the universe to get away from me any more, but I'm not going to kid myself that the TARDIS is entirely comfortable with me hanging around here; if I tried to link myself up to her like this, she'd probably kick me out before I could blink. According to the databanks, the TARDIS should be able to do this kind of thing- she could even temporarily halt the spread of the virus to give you more time to make contact with the Doctor before things get any worse- but the virus will remain in the Doctor until _he _decides to release it… and, in his current state, the only way he's going to be able to make that kind of decision is if someone goes in there and _convinces _him to do it."

"Right…" Martha said, staring at Jack for a moment before she sighed and turned back to look at the TARDIS console.

_Well_, she reflected grimly, _it _would _make my wedding memorable…_

Most people just got to remember the song played by the band; she'd get to remember the time she helped save the last Time Lord from extinction.

"So…" she asked, glancing back at Jack as she indicated the panel before her. "How do we do this?"

After giving her a brief smile of gratitude, Jack walked over to the TARDIS console and laid the Doctor down on the ground beside it, subsequently moving one of his arms so that the Doctor's hand was placed on one of the circular panels Jack had pointed out to her.

"Just place one hand on the other circuit and then put your other hand on the Doctor's," Jack explained, as he turned back to look at her. "That should create a small 'network' between you, the Doctor and the TARDIS-"

"And if it doesn't work?" Martha cut in; if she was going to do this, she wasn't going in without being certain she'd covered every angle.

"Well…" Jack said, pausing uncertainly for a moment, before he shrugged. "Nothing, really; if it doesn't work, I think it's safe to say that the TARDIS decided there's not enough left of the Doctor's mind to save…"

He trailed off at that last comment, clearly uncomfortable at what he was saying, but Martha understood what he meant; if this attempt to 'link' her to the Doctor didn't do anything, it was because they were already too late to save him.

"Anything else I should know?" she asked as she crouched down, placing one hand on the Doctor's face- the face that she had already restored once by passing on her message to the world; if she remembered that, it could help her stay focused on her goal-, the other one hovering over the circuit in anticipation.

"Well," Jack said, looking uncomfortably at her, "according to the databanks, the virus won't be able to affect _you_- you don't have any telepathic receptors for it to use to gain access to your mind in the first place; the Doctor and the TARDIS are doing all the work to link you up here-, but the TARDIS can only hold back the virus for so long; if you can't convince the Doctor to let it go in time, once the TARDIS loses its hold on the virus…"

Taking a deep breath, Jack looked resolutely at Martha, all discomfort pushed aside in favour of what he had to say. "There's a good chance that, if he dies while you're connected to him, he'll take you with him."

Despite the grim mood on Jack's face at the implications of his last statement, Martha smiled dismissively at his comment.

"Well, who wants to live forever anyway?" she said, trying to sound more casual than she felt.

She certainly hadn't expected her wedding day to turn out like _this_; about to take a dive inside the head of a nine hundred year old alien to try and convince him to live, with the chances being apparently increasingly likely that she'd end up dying _with _him rather than managing to save him…

But it was the Doctor's _life _on the line here.

After everything he'd shown her, after he'd touched the lives of so many people, after all the times he'd saved this planet… Hell, after what he'd sacrificed to save the _universe_…

The least that she could do was at least _try_ and save him.

Pushing all other thoughts aside, Martha refocused her gaze on the Doctor as he lay before her, his still face giving no indicating of the battle that was even now waging inside his head, her hand crossing those last few inches to make contact with the telepathic circuits…

* * *

As she blinked her eyes open- she hadn't even been aware of closing them-, Martha's first thought was that someone had turned out the lights, and then her outstretched hand- neither of them in contact with the Doctor or the TARDIS any more- felt something made of stone positioned before her and she began to acclimatise herself to her new 'environment'.

Feeling her way around the object before her as her eyes adjusted to… wherever this was (If she _was _in the Doctor's mind, it was a lot darker than she'd expected)…, Martha swiftly established that it wasn't a wall, but was instead a simple lump of stone, apparently rectangular in shape, coming up to around waist height and fairly smooth in appearance.

In fact, it was almost like…

Martha's eyes widened in horror.

_No_… she thought, crouching down to examine the object before her. _It can't be_…

It was a gravestone.

However, it was the name _on _the gravestone that truly terrified Martha.

_The Doctor_.

She was too late.

She was in the Doctor's mind, but the Doctor was already dead…


	3. When Everything’s Made To Be Broken

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters you recognise; usual drill

Feedback: Feel free

AN: Sorry about how long it took to get this one out (Particularly after how the last one ended); I had a _lot _to include in this chapter and I had to make sure I got everything down

AN 2: Reference is made to my story "Filling in the Blanks", which features my theory regarding how the BBC Eighth Doctor novels tie in with the Time War; reading it is not necessary to understand the relevant scenes, but it might help

Surrender

_NO!_ Martha yelled inwardly, slamming her hand against the gravestone as the light around her continued to improve, fighting to stop the tears that had just appeared at the corners of her eyes. _He _can't _be dead… he _CAN'T _be_-

Then her gaze fell on the numbers below the name, and she paused.

_747 years to 840_ _years_.

"What the…?" Martha muttered, looking closely at the grave stone; now that she looked more closely, there was also a long multi-coloured scarf lying draped around the grave, as though it had slipped off the grave after being placed over it initially, almost as though it had been placed there in memory of the deceased.

This didn't make sense; even if this _was _the Doctor's grave, why would it give the… age… of death as eight hundred and forty, when he'd stated more than once that he was nine hundred…?

Then Martha saw another gravestone to the left of the one before her- this time with _The Doctor; 600 years to 747 years_ written on it, with a white shirt with a frilled collar and sleeves draped over it-, and re-evaluated her original theory.

These couldn't _both _be for theDoctor; the question was, who _were _they for…?

Glancing to her right, she saw another grave- this one with a cricket bat leaning against it and a beige frock coat with red lining and a stick of celery pinned to one lapel draped over one corner-, this one listing the Doctor as having 'lasted' from 840 years to 899 years, along with four other graves beyond that; the next grave in the line had a multi-coloured coat composed of multiple clashing fabrics, and the one after that seemed to have an umbrella leaning against it, but beyond that it was hard to make anything obvious out in the mist that had apparently settled over this area. Looking in the other direction, Martha could only see two graves beyond the one she'd noticed earlier; assuming that these were all for the Doctor, and taking the Doctor she knew into account- assuming that none of these were for him-, that added up to ten different Doctors, which at least fitted with what she'd read in the various UNIT files about the number of different Doctors they'd encountered over the years.

Now that Martha thought about it, UNIT files _did _feature reference to Doctors who wore some of the clothing before her; she recalled a few references to files in the late seventies talking about a Doctor who wore a scarf like the one she'd seen on the first grave, while the multi-coloured coat resembled the descriptions she'd read of the clothing worn by the Doctor who'd been involved in this incident with the Fourth Reich and an alien ship kept in a village that had been abandoned in 1944…

_Of _course, she realised, snapping her fingers as an explanation for the sight before her struck home.

None of these graves were for the _current _Doctor; they must be some kind of psychological representation of the Doctor's memory of the death of his previous… bodies, until she could think of a better term… with the numbers on the graves reflecting how long each body had lasted before they regenerated into the next one…

The only question was, where was the _current _Doctor in all this…?

"_Martha Jones_…" a voice said, drawing her attention away from the graves. Turning to look at the source of the voice, Martha's eyes instantly focused on the unexpected sight of a woman with dark blonde hair in a dark blue dress, almost the same colour as the TARDIS's outer shell, looking at her with a warm smile and blue eyes the same colour as the dress.

"Who…?" Martha asked, looking uncertainly at the woman before her before a sudden thought occurred to her; given that she was meant to be inside the Doctor's mind right now, when the woman's 'similarities' to the TARDIS were taken into account…

"Are you… the TARDIS?" she asked at last, hoping that the statement didn't sound as stupid to the other woman as it did to her; if she was wrong in her guess, she was _really _going to feel like an idiot…

"_I am… the avatar of the TARDIS_," the woman said after a momentary pause, smiling warmly at the human doctor before assuming a more solemn expression as she indicated a path behind her, leading past the nine graves and into an area that was currently shrouded in mist. "_My champion is this way, Martha Jones; you must come with me if he is to live_."

Nodding in understanding, Martha stood up and walked in the direction that the TARDIS had indicated- and _God_, that was a weird sentence to think; even with the knowledge that the TARDIS was alive she'd grown used to thinking of it as the police box she travelled in rather than something that could speak to her-, swiftly finding herself amidst another collection of slightly smaller gravestones, just a few feet away from the ones for the previous Doctors.

Glancing at the names around her, Martha initially recognised none of them- _Katarina_, _Sara Kingdom_, _Adric_,_ Kamelion_, _Roz Forrester_, _C'Rizz_-, but as she continued walking, she began to spot a few more familiar names among the small collection of memorials; _Dorothea 'Dodo Chaplet_, _Liz Shaw_, _Claire Aldwych_, _Jeremy Fitzoliver_…

'Dorothea' only inspired vague memories of the Doctor using it as a nickname for that dodo they'd rescued from the Museum of the Last Ones- although if he'd known someone with that name before it at least explained where he'd come up with the name in the first place-, but Liz Shaw…

Hadn't a scientist of that name been the Doctor's assistant when he'd first started working for UNIT back in the seventies? According to some of the files Martha had glanced over- after joining UNIT she'd looked over some records of the Doctor's time with the organisation-, Liz had worked with the Doctor for a year before going on to work at Cambridge on various research projects while still remaining affiliated with UNIT, only to die in 2003 during that 'Agent Orange' incident which resulted in the death of a significant portion of Earth's population in the Middle East…

As for the others… she definitely recalled reading about Claire Aldwych in that file about the Fourth Reich- Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart had recommended her for a posthumous award of some sort for her aid in helping him and the Doctor track down the Fourth Reich's headquarters (That file had given Martha more than one nightmare; the idea of Hitler having a _son_…)-, and Jeremy Fitzoliver rang a faint bell; he'd been a photographer who tagged along with the Doctor back when he'd first travelled with Sarah Jane Smith…

"These… these are his old friends, aren't they?" Martha asked, turning to look uncomfortably at the TARDIS avatar; just by being in the presence of these graves, she felt like she was violating some private space.

"_All who have died in their travels with him… and even those who have merely died deaths that he has witnessed after their departure from him_," the TARDIS replied, bowing her head slightly as she looked at Martha. "_His compassion is one of his strongest traits… but it leaves him deeply vulnerable to those enemies who properly understand him… especially after recent… events_."

Martha could only nod at that last comment.

It was a valid point; the Doctor's compassion might be one of the things she lov- that she _most admired_ about him, but it could leave him particularly vulnerable to those villains who knew how to play him properly (The memory of his anguish when he had been forced to watch the Master die remained prominent in her mind, to say nothing of the state he'd been in when Davros had 'shown him his soul' during the Dalek theft of Earth; she wished she'd stayed to try and reassure the Doctor that Davros had been wrong, but at the time she'd assumed that the Doctor would prefer to catch up with Rose rather than waste time with her…).

"_And this one_…" the TARDIS continued, indicating something behind Martha, a solemn expression on her 'face' (Martha wasn't sure if she could consider the body before her as 'real' given that she was only witnessing it inside a man's mind), "_this one is the one that has caused him the greatest pain since he first remembered it_."

Looking up at the sight before her, Martha's eyes widened at the sight of a vast memorial arch before her, stretching up almost beyond the point where her eyes could see the top- although the mist around her didn't exactly help matters; if this was in the Doctor's mind he could at least try to make it less depressing-, covered in names that Martha could barely make out even as she walked into the arch, staring with wide eyes at the sheer scale of the construct before her; the fact that she consciously knew it didn't technically exist didn't stop her appreciating the size of it…

As she continued to study the arch, Martha's eyes immediately gravitated to the names listed on a golden panel in the middle of the arch, apparently deliberately selected to be more prominent than the rest. Leaning to look at the panel, Martha took in the small selection of names listed there; _Romanadvoratrelunder (Romana)_, _Leela_, _Susan_, _Innocet_, _Irving Braxiatel_, _Damon_, _Drax_, _Andred_, _Jenny-_

Martha stopped reading instantly, the implications of that last name hitting her full force.

There was only one reason that Martha could think of for Jenny's name to be on a monument of this size.

"Is this…?" Martha asked, turning back to look uncertainly at the TARDIS.

"_Yes_," the woman replied, nodding at Martha. "_This is his memorial to Gallifrey, and all the Time Lords who perished in its destruction; the plaque before you holds the names of those few from that planet who he would always care for_."

"Just _them_?" Martha asked, looking at the names before her in shock; compared to the size of the arch, these few names before her were practically a drop in the ocean.

"_Gallifrey was our place of birth, Martha, but Earth has always been our _home," the TARDIS explained, her gaze soft as she looked at Martha. "_Your people took us in and gave us purpose while teaching him the compassion and thirst to explore that he values so highly are not unique in the universe; compared to the many connections and friends we have formed on your planet, during our many centuries among your people, Gallifrey offered so few people who truly understood him, and many of those had to travel with him before they could do so…_"

The TARDIS sighed. "_As much as he misses them, he _left_ them long ago; Earth became our home in every way that matters- as much as any planet can be said to be his home- long ago_."

"Is that why…?" Martha began, only to stop herself from finishing the sentence; she had come here to make sure the Doctor _didn't _die, not ask why he'd chosen Earth as the place where he wanted to end it!

"_Yes_," the TARDIS said, in answer to Martha' unasked question, before she stretched out a hand. "_He is there_."

Turning around, Martha's eyes automatically fixed on the form she'd been looking for since she entered this bleak place; the Doctor, on the ground at the other end of the arch, curled up in a ball as he lay on the ground, his body shaking as he sobbed into his arms. His suit was stained with the 'earth' of the 'graveyard' and his coat was torn and damaged as it hung around him, as though he'd walked through a storm of some kind and had finally given up.

Martha almost couldn't believe it; the idea of the Doctor looking so… pathetic, for lack of a better term…

It almost seemed more wrong than the idea of him being brain-dead had been in the first place.

"Will he…?" Martha began, looking uncertainly at the TARDIS, not entirely certain how to phrase what she wanted to ask.

"_He will know that you are real, Martha Jones; in this place, the reality of your presence will be evident to him_," the TARDIS replied, nodding solemnly at her. "_May you succeed, Martha Jones_."

With that, the TARDIS stepped back and faded into the mist, leaving Martha to walk over to crouch down beside the Doctor (Glancing at the mud already staining her dress, she was grateful that this was only taking place on a mental level; she was going to have enough explaining as it was without worrying about getting the dress cleaned).

"Doctor?" she said at last, uncomfortably reminded of the last time she'd seen the Doctor look so weak after he'd been blasted by the Master's laser screwdriver. "Can you hear me?"

"M… Martha?" the Doctor said, his voice weak as he looked up at her, an expression of such utter pain and devastation on his face that Martha was almost tempted to hug him before she pushed that thought aside. "Wh… what are you… doing here?"

"Trying to save _you_, you big idiot; what else would I be here for?" Martha asked, the smile on her face belying her current inclination to punch him for trying to essentially kill himself; with the emotional state the Doctor would have to be in to get to this point, trying to threaten him with physical harm would probably do the wrong kind of damage. "Look, we've got you linked up to the TARDIS, but you have to _fight_-"

"You shouldn't be here…" the Doctor whispered, tears running down his face as he lowered his eyes, almost as though he was trying to avoid looking at her; he certainly didn't seem to be that inclined to listen to her. "I don't deserve it… I killed them all…"

"Who?" Martha asked, looking at him uncertainly; the implications of his words combined with their location were suggestive, but she wasn't going to make assumptions until she knew all the facts. "Doctor, what are you _talking _about-?"

As she reached out to place a hand on his shoulder, everything suddenly blurred around her-

_Katarina- so convinced she was heading for her Place of Perfection-, sucked out of an airlock to give them a chance to escape the Daleks…_

_Sara Kingdom- determined to vanquish the Daleks and avenge her brother-, aged to death in a matter of minutes by the Dalek Time Destructor…_

_Adric- a genius with oh-so-limited social skills-, thought lost long ago in an explosion above ancient Earth, now dying of old age in a bed in a Victorian household, his last act being to guide the stolen TARDIS back to him…_

_Kamelion- the noble android servant, so willing yet so unable to grow beyond his programming-, begging for death rather than living to be possibly used by the Master once again…_

_Claire- determined and ambitious, but still an essentially compassionate woman where it counted-, burning to death decades before her birth as part of an insane Nazi plot she should never have been involved in…_

_Jeremy- a well-meaning but frustrating fool-, dying a pointless death after losing his memory as a consequence of a flawed experiment and the Doctor's own lack of concern…_

_Roz Forrester- a noble soul underneath a mess of prejudices and personal issues-, giving her life to ensure the fall of the corrupt Earth empire, the Doctor too busy to save her…_

_Liz Shaw- a brilliant scientist and a valued friend-, burned alive from the inside out as the water in her body turned to acid…_

_Dodo Chaplet- a young girl eager to see the world-, condemned to insanity and death at the hands of the Master's agents, as he sought information on a Doctor who had long since regenerated…_

_C'Rizz- a former killer who had sought to grow beyond his old limits-, burning himself out in a desperate attempt to save a planet that wasn't his own in a universe that he'd barely had the chance to explore…_

_Gallifrey- his home planet, the world that had given him life-, destroyed by his own hand, the world burning to ashes, Leela- the noble savage with the keen, inquisitive mind- and Romana- the former aristocrat who now sought to reform her world- burning with it…_

-and then 'reality'snapped back into place, leaving Martha staring silently at the Doctor.

_Well_, she thought to herself, as she glanced around at the arch surrounding them, as well as the small graveyard outside it, _at least that explains why he's _here_…_

However, it didn't help her figure out why he was _allowing _himself to die right now.

She wasn't denying that he was in obvious emotional pain, but he'd been dealing with this grief since before she'd known him and it had never seemed to stop him back then; why would it have that effect now?

"I thought I was helping them…" the Doctor said, the tears increasing in intensity as he stared at her, one hand now resting on the ground as though he needed extra support simply to remain upright. "I tried to help them grow… to encourage them to become more… and they _died _because of me…"

"They didn't die _because _of _you_, Doctor-" Martha began.

"_I couldn't help them_!" the Doctor yelled, continuing to cry- Martha had never seen him show this much emotion about _anything_- as he bowed his head, apparently overcome by his own pain. "The Master called me the man who 'makes people better', but it's all a _joke_… Even when they _lived_ I ruined their lives… Either they can't go back or I turn them into killers-"

"God, now you're listening to _Davros_?" Martha groaned, crouching down to grip the Doctor's shoulders and force him to look at her. "Doctor, I was only going to activate the Osterhagen Key because I thought there was no other way-"

"_There should ALWAYS be another way_-!" the Doctor began, staring in outrage at her.

"_And _because I thought _I _was going to die when I set those bombs off in the first place," Martha continued, staring intently at the Doctor to make sure he understood what she had just said, putting aside her outrage that he thought her capable of something like that; she probably hadn't exactly helped his opinion by declining the option of explaining her actions after they'd restored Earth to its proper place. "Just like Sarah Jane and Jack were only willing to activate that explosion because they knew _it _would kill _them_… or, at least, it would kill Sarah; Jack might have managed to stick himself back together eventually but he'd still have been stuck out there naked for God knows how long until somebody picked him up…"

As she looked at the Doctor, Martha smiled slightly at the small grin now visible on his face at her brief 'joke'- not a very cheery one, she admitted, but it was _something_-, only to assume a more solemn expression when the smile vanished, his original depression once again overwhelming him.

"You don't make us into people who _kill _in your name, Doctor," Martha continued, leaning slightly closer to make sure he understood what she was saying, praying that she would get through to him in time. "You make us people who'll _die _in your name… because we know you'd do the same for us."

For a moment, the Doctor simply sat in silence, staring reflectively at Martha as she stared pleadingly back at him, urging him to accept what she'd just told him and recognise that Davros had been wrong about him…

Then the Doctor shook his head, and Martha's brief hopes were dashed by his next words.

"It doesn't matter…" he said, his tone now so low that Martha could barely hear him. "I've killed so many… ended so many lives… allowed so much death…"

He sighed grimly. "It's… _better _I end it now…"

"Hold on; it's _better _for you to _die_?" Martha asked, looking incredulously at him. "Why would you think that-?"

"My death would stop _this_," the Doctor said simply.

Before Martha could ask him to elaborate, everything blurred around her once again, fading away to reveal what appeared to be a courtroom, with twelve people dressed in elaborate robes of either orange or white- as well as a severe-looking woman in white robes and an elaborate white headpiece with a red scarf in the middle of the room- sitting in front of a large screen. Sitting opposite Martha and the Doctor was a man with a long, weathered-looking face dressed in black robes, while just to their right was a man with thick blond curls and a slightly rounded appearance, dressed in a multi-coloured coat…

Martha's eyes widened.

"Is that… _you_?" she asked, indicating the man standing beside them as she looked at the Doctor, recognising the coat from the grave she'd glimpsed earlier.

"My sixth life," the Doctor said simply, as he looked at the sight before him. "I was subjected to a sham trial after I discovered that a group of renegade high-placed Time Lords had moved Earth from its proper location to conceal the fact that vital secrets had been stolen from us. The prosecutor- known as the Valeyard- seemed to be fixing the evidence to try and frame me… but even then I never imagined how far the High Council had gone when they recruited him…"

Before Martha could ask what the Doctor had meant by that, the screen above her changed to show a dark-haired man with a neat goatee dressed in black- given what the Doctor had told her and Jack about the Master, if that man wasn't a younger version of the man she'd once known as Harold Saxon Martha would be _very _surprised-, looking in a satisfied manner out at the group before him, his gaze fixed on the man Martha assumed was the Valeyard.

"_They made a deal with the Valeyard- or as I've always known him, the Doctor-_," the Master said, smugness evident in his voice as he looked at the prosecutor, "_to adjust the evidence, in return for which he was promised the remainder of the Doctor's regenerations_."

"_This is clearly_-" the Valeyard said, standing up to look at the woman in the middle of the room in outrage.

"_JUST A MINUTE_!" the past Doctor yelled, his gaze now fixed on the Valeyard with shock written all over his face (Shock that Martha knew was echoed on her own face; the implications of the Master's last statement were something she _couldn't _believe). "_Did you call him… the Doctor_?"

"_There is some evil in all of us, Doctor, even you_," the Master said, his tone continuing to convey the smug self-satisfaction that would have confirmed his identity for Martha even without the Doctor's old tales. "_The Valeyard is an amalgamation of the… darker sides of your nature, somewhere between your twelfth and final incarnation_."

With that statement made, the world around them paused, leaving Martha to stare incredulously at the black-clad man opposite them.

"He was… _you_?" she asked at last, turning to look at the Doctor.

"A dark future version of me who went on to become Jack the Ripper after failing to kill the renegade High Council that created him," the Doctor said, his tone grim as he looked at the man before them, his expression showing a mixture of fear and hatred that not even the Master had inspired in him. "He tried to corrupt human history- he even managed to corrupt _my _history- with a dark secret from Gallifrey's past- the combined power of the dark nature of all dead Time Lords gathered in one place, fed by the Ripper murders to keep it under control, unleashed on Victorian London-, and I barely managed to stop him from completing his sick plot…"

He swallowed, looking at the man before him with an expression that was possibly the closest thing to genuine fear that Martha had ever seen on the Doctor's face. "But no matter what I do… no matter how our confrontations end… I can't be certain that I won't become him when the time comes…"

"What?" Martha asked, turning to look at the Doctor with renewed concern; the possible implications of what the Doctor had just said were definitely not something she wanted him to think about if she was going to convince him to live. "Doctor, you can't worry about the future based on _one _look at it-"

"Two glimpses," the Doctor said, his voice barely raising above its defeated tone as he spoke. "Here's the other one…"

After another momentary blurring of the world around her, Martha found herself standing in a large chamber filled with aged green leather pews, surrounded by people clad in suits of armour that almost looked like they were made of bone. To the right of where she and the Doctor stood were the only two figures not clad in bone; a tall auburn-haired woman with a squarish face dressed in black was standing alongside a man with long brown hair dressed in a Victorian-style green velvet coat and cream waistcoat and trousers who could only be the current Doctor.

Their gaze was currently fixed on what appeared to be the central podium of this twisted chamber, where a one-armed man sat and gazed out at the chamber before him, his bone armour and hessian cloak doing little to conceal a body that demonstrated a keen strength without the need for muscle.

The one-armed man with the face of the Doctor who stood opposite him…

"The armoured me's Grandfather Paradox," the Doctor said, in answer to her unasked question as she turned to look back at him. "He's essentially a twisted future version of my eighth incarnation, who, having been corrupted by my enemies, went on to become the personification of the god of Faction Paradox, time-travelling voodooists dedicated to paradox and chaos… and the true destroyers of Gallifrey."

Martha blinked in confusion.

"Hold on; _they _destroyed Gallifrey?" she repeated, looking uncertainly at the Doctor; seeing two of the same _version _of him in the same place- without any sign that one of them was a clone- was confusing enough without him starting to contradict everything he'd told her before. "But… the Daleks-"

"Took the Faction's place after I eliminated him," the Doctor said, indicating the man sitting in the podium with the Doctor's face. "Grandfather Paradox was the personification of the Faction's God, the ultimate ideal of all who worship time paradoxes… the personification of the ability to destroy your past while retaining your future… and the result of my timeline being altered and my body contaminated by the Paradox biodata virus."

He swallowed slightly as the scene shifted, showing what appeared to be the Victorian-esque Doctor standing at a TARDIS console that had been apparently carved out of bone, facing…

Martha wasn't sure _who _he was facing; one moment it looked more like Grandfather Paradox, then it seemed to _blur _and become Davros, only to go back to the Grandfather momentarily before becoming Davros again…

"The final struggle resulted in me undoing the Faction's hold over my history," the Doctor explained, indicating where the Grandfather stared at his younger self in a rage. "I… essentially, I released all of the TARDIS's energy in one massive burst, leaving the old girl virtually powerless, destroying the entire Faction fleet and everything in my home system… and also negating the timeline that resulted in me being infected by the virus that would turn me into the Grandfather. With him erased, the Faction's entire existence was negated- kind of hard to exist when your creator never created you in the first place-, but…"

He sighed once again, staring silently for a moment as the 'vision' before them shifted from showing the version of him that might have been to 'displaying' the wheelchair-confined madman who had created the Daleks, before he spoke again. "But the universe had to give me a reason to act the way I had done, and so the Daleks were… slotted in… to take their place as Gallifrey's destroyers; as far as history is concerned."

He grimaced slightly at what he had said. "All of history changed itself to suit my goal…"

"You didn't _plan _it-" Martha began (Even without knowing the _full _details of what she was witnessing- all this talk of history changing was enough to make her head hurt-, she knew that the Doctor wouldn't have set out to do something like that deliberately; he must have literally exhausted every other possible option available to him and been left with literally _one_ last choice if he was going to save _anything_).

"What I planned… or didn't plan… it doesn't matter," the Doctor said, shaking his head grimly. "Two glimpses of my future… and each time I saw it, I've become everything I've ever fought. Even if one of them's gone, the _Valeyard_ still has the potential to be born… and if he was like that when my people were there to potentially keep me in check, if I become that _now_…

He shook his head as he continued to sit in the mud, seemingly resolved in his decision. "It's better to end it now than give them the chance of coming true…"


	4. The Moment of Truth In Your Lies

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters you recognise; usual drill

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Surrender

"But… but you don't _know _that's what's going to happen!" Martha yelled, looking desperately at the Doctor; he couldn't be about to let himself die because of what he'd become in _possible _futures! "You said yourself they were just _possible _futures; you can't _kill _yourself just because of something that _might _happen!"

"If I die now… I stop the mere _chance _that they'll come into being," the Doctor said; Martha wasn't sure if he was even aware that she'd spoken to him in the first place and was simply continuing to remind himself of the reasons why he was doing this. "I've caused so much death already…"

"Only when you didn't have a _choice_-" Martha tried to insist.

"At what point does that stop being enough?" the Doctor asked, staring back at Martha with an earnest gaze that seemed almost torn between two extremes; the part of the Doctor that genuinely believed what he was doing was for the bet, and the part of him that recognised that he still had so much good he could do in his remaining lives. "I destroyed my people- Rassilon, I destroyed my own _planet_- just to save my own future…"

"You just told me that the Faction liked nothing more than screwing up time in a way that even _I _know is dangerous; if they'd _lived_-" Martha began.

"The large-scale consequences don't matter," the Doctor said, shaking his head once again. "If I can do that kind of thing for the right reason… how long until I can do it for the wrong one?"

"You wouldn't," Martha said, shaking her head resolutely. "You _couldn't _do that."

The Doctor might doubt himself at times, but if he was capable of showing mercy to the Master even after everything he'd been through during the 'Year That Never as', then there was no question in Martha's mind that he could _never _commit destruction on the scale they were currently talking about without a certainty that there was no other option.

"But… I can't _know _that…" the Doctor said (Martha thought she detected an element of uncertainty in his voice, but pushed that thought aside; if it wasn't there she'd just be getting her hopes up for nothing). "I can't _know _that's going to always be the case…"

"Well… what about _us_?" Martha asked, seizing on the chance to ask the question that she still hadn't learned an answer to; the Doctor had always been rather quiet in his previous visits about what had happened to Rose after the confrontation with Davros… "What about your friends… what about _Rose_; isn't _she _worth-?"

"Rose?" the Doctor said, a brief twitch occurring at the corner of his mouth that may have been anything from pain to rage- Martha couldn't be certain which- before he continued, still apparently fighting an increasing weakness (That issue was definitely a problem; if the Doctor was growing weaker in his current state with the virus, who was to say how long she had until the virus started to spread again). "Rose… I nearly ruined her… she was obsessed… what she tried to do… had to leave her…"

"What?" Martha asked, rapidly feeling like she was losing the plot of this particular chain of events; after spending all that time missing Rose, the Doctor had just… _left _her somewhere?

"She created a dimensional cannon… to try and get back to me," the Doctor explained, his tone still grim as he spoke. "I _told _her that two universes could collapse if I tried to get back to her… I _told _her what the consequences would be… and she went and tried to do it at _her_ end, _without _my experience…"

Martha's eyes widened.

If the Doctor had thought that something would have been dangerous to attempt even when _he _was the one doing it…

She didn't kid herself that the Doctor was perfect, but if he was as certain that something would be dangerous as it seemed he'd been about this 'jumping universes' thing, that seemed like a good reason to avoid doing it.

Even with the knowledge that the Doctor thought that something was dangerous… Rose had put _two _universes at risk… just to get back to the Doctor?

"I… _can't _inspire that," the Doctor said, echoing Martha's own thoughts on the matter; no matter how he might have once felt about Rose, the Doctor could never accept someone going to those kind of lengths in his name (At least when she and Jack had threatened to commit mass murder they'd been trying to stop Davros destroying the universe; what Rose had apparently tried to do would have put an _unimaginable _number of people at risk just to help herself). "I… left her back in her world…her new world… told her to destroy the cannon… left him to help her..."

"Him?" Martha repeated, momentarily confused at this new addition to the story before the identity of the person the Doctor was referring to occurred to her; the only person who could have helped Rose in that situation whose absence had remained unexplained since the last time she saw him. "You mean… the _other _you?"

"They both needed to grow," the Doctor said, looking slightly up at her as he continued, apparently wanting to ensure she understood his reasoning behind his actions. "She needed to find her way in _that _universe… he needed to find his own path… they both needed to be _away _from me if they were going to become the people they have the potential to be…"

"Well… that's good, right?" Martha said, trying to sound encouraging as she looked at the Doctor. "You gave her a second chance-"

"I shouldn't have _needed _to give her that chance!" the Doctor said, fresh tears once again trickling down his face. "She was meant to _grow _from her time with me, not come to _depend _on me; I nearly ruined her life-"

"You couldn't have _known _that was going to happen!" Martha interjected, unable to stop the slight joy she felt at the implication that the Doctor's old feelings for Rose weren't what they had been; she'd moved on from him, and that was that. "Doctor, everyone makes mistakes-"

"_I CAUSED THE TIME WAR, MARTHA_!" the Doctor yelled, suddenly grabbing her shoulders as he stared at her. "_I _was the reason the Faction were able to infect my past self- I gave them an opening when I changed my _own history _by _accident_-, and then, in the _new _timeline, because I _didn't _destroy the Daleks when I was sent back to their beginning, I _allowed them to annihilate my own people_!"

For a moment, Martha could only stare in silence at the Doctor's latest revelation, the Doctor's face torn between grief and anger as he stared at her- although Martha knew the anger was for himself rather than her- while she tried to think of something to say, some comfort- however slight- that she could offer, no matter how inadequate it might have been, before the Doctor spoke again.

"I failed my own people…" he said, staring up at the names carved on the arch around him before his gaze shifted to the small collection of graves outside the arch. "I've failed so many old friends… I _can't _risk failing Earth again…"

"We're safer _with _you-" Martha began.

"Are you?" the Doctor asked, looking at her for a moment before he sighed again. "I don't know… and… I'm… I'm _tired_ of not knowing, Martha…"

Before Martha could ask hat he meant by that, he had lowered himself back into his original slump on the ground, only the fact that he continued to speak showing that he was still aware of her presence. "I'm tired of this life… I'm tired of the evil… I'm tired of the fight… I'm tired of fearing the future… I'm tired of finding things that force me to second-guess my past… and I'm tired of having to give up everything I care for because it's what's 'best' for others."

_What_…? Martha wondered, looking in confusion at the Doctor.

What did he mean by that last comment…?

"I made my granddaughter leave me because it was time for her to have her own life…" the Doctor continued, seemingly barely aware of Martha's presence any more; it was like she was just here to serve as his sounding board as he talked (Then again, it wasn't like Martha wasn't used to it; he'd certainly spent enough time just talking _to _her back when they'd been travelling together). "I sacrificed my freedom because I had to send innocent soldiers home… I had to say goodbye to one of my best friends because of my peoples' prejudices… I've lost at least _four _of my lives because I had to save others… hundreds of alternate mes died to save reality… I had to destroy millions in order to save a planet because I made a mistake… I had to completely wipe out _three _different realities to save this one… I destroyed my entire _planet_ because the alternative was to let my enemies win forever… my own daughter let herself die so she couldn't be used as a hostage against me… I even had to give up the woman I love because I had _nothing _to offer her…"

He lowered his head as he sobbed once again. "I just want it to _stop_… why can't you let it _stop_…?"

"Because we _need _you, Doctor-" Martha began, trying to place her hands on his shoulders.

"No…" the Doctor whispered, shaking his head as he lowered it, deliberately avoiding looking at Martha as new tears trickled down his face, moving back a couple of inches to cut off her attempts to make contact. "You don't… you moved on… you have someone who _won't _kill… someone who _can _give you everything…"

Martha froze.

There was _no _way the Doctor could mean what it sounded like he'd meant in that last statement…

Even after what he'd said about Rose… he had to mean her when he was talking about the woman he loved…

"I've lost everything…" the Doctor continued, seemingly unaware of Martha's reaction to his last statement. "I lost my family… I lost my planet… I lost so many friends… I lost your love… I lost _you_… Why can't you just let me _die_…?"

"Hold on; you 'lost' me?" Martha repeated, staring incredulously at the Doctor, her shock at what she'd just heard him admit- he actually felt… _that _way about her?- overwhelmed by her anger at the implications of what he seemed to have thought about their previous relationship. "You never 'had' me; you just… kept me around while brooding over your ex!"

"I was trying to _protect_ you…" the Doctor muttered.

"From what; your life?" Martha countered, looking at him with renewed frustration. "You're not some bloody superhero with a secret identity that I can't be involved with because it's dangerous, Doctor; just _travelling _with you made me a target for every alien creep you've ever hacked off- I had Queen Elizabeth's soldiers shooting arrows at me on my first trip for something you hadn't even _done _yet, remember?-, and I was _fine _with the risks if it meant _I could be with you_!"

"I can't…" the Doctor began.

"Can't what; _show _the poor little human what the big all-powerful Time Lord's feeling?" Martha countered, rolling her eyes sarcastically. "Oh, of _course _you can't; how could I _ever _hope to cope with what you're feeling? What is it, were you _embarrassed_; with your 'mighty Time Lord mind', is falling for me like me falling for a superintelligent chimp? Did you just fall for me because I actually showed an _interest_? Did you just feel _sorry_ for me after that whole year with the Master? Was I just not _blonde _enough to-"

"_I can't give you anything_!" the Doctor yelled.

For a moment, there was only silence, Martha looking at the Doctor in confusion while the Doctor seemed apparently unable to believe what he'd just said, before the Doctor lowered his head and spoke again.

"I can't… I can't give you anything," he said, his voice low as he stared at the ground, his tone depressed. "A family… a husband… a house… I can't give… it's not that I don't _want _to… it's just… I _can't_…"

Martha could only stare silently at him for a moment- a part of her mind was still trying to catch up to the idea that the Doctor actually felt that way about her, while the rest of her was unable to believe why he hadn't pursued those feelings further-, before she finally collected herself enough to speak.

"That's _it_?" she yelled, staring in ever-increasing incredulity at the Time Lord before her; she'd spent at least a quarter of her early relationship with Tom wondering what she might have done differently to attract the Doctor's attention, only to learn that the only reason he'd never done anything was because _he _didn't think he deserved _her_? "Did you even bother to _ask _if I wanted all that?"

"I always take away their chances at normal lives…" the Doctor said, his tone increasingly dejected as he looked briefly up at Martha, apparently unaware that she had just spoken to him. "I… I _couldn't _let that happen to you… but… the wedding…"

Martha paused, knowing without needing to ask that what the Doctor had to say next was going to be particularly important (Even if a part of her still couldn't believe what he was actually saying; after so long spent believing he _didn't _see her…).

"I… I couldn't cope," the Doctor said at last, looking apologetically at her. "I… I know you wanted me there… but I _couldn't _go there… couldn't _see _myself lose you… like I lost everything else… threw myself into my life… put myself at risk… tried to escape it..."

Despite his bleak expression, he actually smirked slightly at that last comment, one corner of his mouth turning up in a small smile as he looked at her. "Ten lifetimes and nearly twelve centuries of life… and the one pain I never learned how to handle is emotional…"

He shook his head, his expression almost the perfect combination of self-loathing and self-pity. "No _wonder _I never went looking for love before…"

"What?" Martha asked, almost unable to believe what she'd just heard. "You _never_…? But… but you're-"

"The tenth lifetime of a man who spent his first seven lives... emotionally distant from everyone he met... and only really started _thinking _about… _that_… in his eighth one," the Doctor said, swallowing slightly as he looked at Martha; evidently the current topic wasn't something he was entirely comfortable with. "I thought I was happy in my first few lives… only looking for friends without ever even _thinking _about… something more… and even my next two bodies… thought it best to maintain a certain… distance… despite the fact that they had developed… urges… but now…?"

He smiled slightly, looking at Martha with an unsteady gaze that did little to comfort her even as a guilty part of her couldn't help but take some joy from his confession. "I had feelings for Rose… but I fell in love with _you_… but I knew… I'd cost you everything… exaggerated old feelings... hid behind old grief… had to protect you… let you go home..."

"Did you ever _ask_ what _I _wanted?" Martha asked, breaking her brief silence to crouch down beside the Doctor, looking at him with a resolute glare that belied the inner joy she felt at the Doctor's last declaration; she would consider any consequences of what she was about to say later. "What if I _wanted _that life with you?"

"Need normality…" the Doctor muttered, looking up at her with another ambiguous expression. "Drawn to the thrill… can't provide normality… nearly ruined Rose… because I couldn't let her go… can't give you what you want..."

"Doctor," Martha said, smiling slightly at him- even when it was something that had caused her pain (To say nothing of showing how frustratingly ignorant he could be for someone so allegedly brilliant), she couldn't help but love his attempt to put what he needed over what he thought she needed or expected-, "I didn't fall in love with you because of the TARDIS or because you're a Time Lord; I fell in love with you because you're _you_! I fell in love with the most intelligent, compassionate, dedicated, and…_ alive _man I ever met; the fact that you weren't human and could travel in time didn't _matter _to me!"

"R… really?" the Doctor asked after a moment's silence, looking up at Martha with a tearful expression of hope that made him look for a brief moment like the child whose enthusiasm he displayed so regularly, seeking comfort after a nightmare, rather than the man who drove back the creatures that inspired such nightmare in the first place.

"Really," Martha replied, nodding slightly as she smiled at the Doctor, reaching over to gently stroke his face, like her mother had done to her sometimes as a child when she woke up after a nightmare. "I don't love you because you're the 'last of the Time Lords', because you can take me to places I never even knew existed, or even because you gave me a chance to help people on a scale I never knew about… I love you because you're _the Doctor._ Whatever kind of life you had to give me- a 'normal' one or one in the TARDIS- would have been fine, so long as it was what _you _wanted to have with me; I _never _expected you to change to be what _I _might want."

"But…" the Doctor whispered softly, looking at her with an uncomfortable gaze as though trying to figure out the best way to ask an awkward question. "But… the wedding… you moved on...?"

Martha sighed.

She had to face facts; the Doctor wasn't the _only _one here who'd made mistakes…

She loved Tom, she really did, but there were times when he did little things- flinching at the description of some of the uglier wounds she told him she'd treated in her work with UNIT, his discomfort when she discussed the Doctor, his occasional attempt to 'protect' her, things like that- that reminded her that, in the end, part of the bond she'd formed with him had been the result of her meeting with his other self in the 'Year That Never Was', resulting in her partly getting involved with him as a result of the knowledge of what he _could _be rather than what he _was_…

Tom was a good man, she wasn't denying that, but in the end, even without his discomfort at coping with the things she had experienced in her travels, she just didn't feel for _him _what she'd felt for the Doctor since the moment she met him… back when he'd just been that strange man who took off his tie with a flourish- something she'd admittedly understood more later- and then started enthusiastically chatting about having met Benjamin Franklin while explaining that he _hadn't_ been outside earlier…

The mystery surrounding him in the beginning might have intrigued her, but it was his bizarre yet infectious… _passion_ for everything from a casual tale about Franklin to being barefoot on the Moon that had truly caused her to fall in love with him in the first place; the fact that he was a time-travelling alien with over a millennium of experience behind him was something she rarely thought about when considering her feelings for him.

"Tom... he's a good guy," she said at last, reaching out to tenderly touch the Doctor's face again. "But… he's not _you_, Doctor. You've got all that… _passion_ and intellect and enthusiasm…"

"He hasn't killed-" the Doctor weakly interjected.

"And you don't _either_," Martha retaliated, glaring at the Doctor. "People may have died because of you, Doctor, but you always _tried _to save them; just because you sometimes failed doesn't mean you _wanted _them to die."

Martha sat in silence for a moment, giving the Doctor time to process what she had just told him, before she continued. "And as for you becoming the Valeyard… You were willing to sacrifice yourself and your planet to save the entire _universe_, you've died or been prepared to die to protect other people for… I don't know _how _many centuries… you've offered mercy to people when nobody could have blamed you for wanting to see them dead for what they did to you… And here you are, willing to let yourself die for good to stop the _chance _of that future coming true; does that _sound _like the life of a man who's going to go evil at _any _point in his life?"

For a moment, the Doctor said nothing, clearly going over what she had just said to him, Martha anxiously crossing her fingers as she stared at the Time Lord before her, until the Doctor spoke at last.

"But… what if you're wrong?" the Doctor asked, looking tearfully back at her, even as Martha caught a glimpse of a faint gleam of hope in his eyes. "What if... it doesn't _work_...?"

"We'd never let that happen," Martha said, her tone permitting no room for argument as she stared back at him, aware even as she spoke that she wasn't just talking about the Doctor's possible future as the Valeyard right now. "You're not alone, Doctor. You have the biggest family in the universe... spread out across who knows _how _many centuries... and _none _of them will allow you to become what you think you'll become. We…"

She took a deep breath, knowing that what she was about to say would forever commit herself to a single course of action, before she spoke again. "We love you."

In the pause that followed, Martha reached up one hand to gently caress the back of the Doctor's head, her eyes fixed on his all the time.

"_I_… love you," she said at last, finally voicing the feelings that she'd spent the better part of the last few years trying to conceal from him- with varying degrees of success-, almost unaware that she was leaning in towards the Doctor or that he was doing the same. "I'll always love you…"

With that, their lips met, the Doctor sitting up straight to wrap his arms around Martha, holding her close as their mouths explored each other with a depth and passion neither of them could ever remember experiencing before, all thoughts of the wedding that she had been meant to be attending pushed out of Martha's mind as she silently revelled in the feel of something she'd once believed she'd never possess…

"Ah, good; you made it then," a voice suddenly said from behind Martha.

Parting from the Doctor in shock, Martha turned around to look in the direction of the voice, her eyes instantly meeting the blue eyes of a tall man with brown hair, slightly curled, dressed in a Victorian-esque clothing of green velvet jacket over a cream-coloured waistcoat and trousers.

"Who-?" Martha began, before another thought occurred to her; given that they were in the Doctor's _mind _right now, coupled with the fact that she recalled reading a file about Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart meeting a man whose description almost perfectly matched the man before her during that thing with that 'Brigham Elijah Dashwood' and those things Dashwood thought were demons…

"Doctor?" she asked uncertainly, looking between the two men, already certain her theory was right; who else but the Doctor could look at the world around them with eyes full of such a combination of experience and compassion?

"In essence, yes; it's a long story, and we don't have time to chat just yet," the other Doctor replied, smiling briefly at Martha before he turned to look at the Doctor. "Let's clean up and get to work, shall we?"

As though his words were a cue, the Doctor's clothing instantly returning to its usual pristine appearance, his suit clean once again and his jacket now completely intact despite its previously torn and tattered appearance.

"Now then," the Doctor said, standing up and flexing his shoulders as he glanced around himself, giving Martha a brief smile of gratitude before he turned back to look at his other self, "seeing as how you're here, I'll assume that I'm now in a fit state to deal with that virus, mmm?"

"Quite," the other Doctor said, nodding in confirmation before his eyes shut. "Contact."

"Contact," the Doctor replied, shutting his own eyes.

For a moment there was only silence, even as Martha… _felt _the thrumming of some kind of energy coming from all around her, the landscape around her seemingly glowing as the Doctors concentrated…

Then the glow lowered, revealing a strange… _thing_… standing before the Doctors, dressed in the black skullcap, elaborate black collar and long black robes of the 'Valeyard', but with at least six legs, wide pale blue eyes, a long nose-like thing, and grey 'skin', giving Martha the impression that it was more of an insect than a sentient being.

"Ah, you chose the image of the Swarm to manifest with, mmm?" the other Doctor said, nodding slightly as he studied the creature. "Intriguing choice…"

"The… the Swarm?" Martha said, looking uncertainly at her Doctor.

"A sentient virus that tried to infect me a few lifetimes back; it existed in the mind-brain interface and attempted to use me to expand into the real world, but I managed to destroy the facility where it was trying to stage its 'uprising'," the Doctor explained, before he turned back to look at the virus. "And as for you… _get out of my mind_."

"_No, Doctor_," the creature- Martha couldn't quite think of it as a virus; even knowing that this was more an interpretation of what was happening rather than the reality, it didn't change the fact that she could see it, which 'contradicted' the nature of a virus as far as she was concerned- replied, its voice sounding like a slightly hoarse snake. "_I have entered your mind… your energy is mine_…"

"_Wrong_," another voice said, as the TARDIS avatar materialised behind the creature- far more smoothly than it did in the real world, Martha noted- and grabbed its 'shoulders'. "_Your time is done_."

With that, the TARDIS smiled briefly at the two Doctors, and then vanished, taking the creature with her before it could even start to protest.

Martha blinked.

"That's… that's it?" she asked, turning to look at the Doctors. "Isn't that a bit… anti-climatic?"

"Oh, there's still the issue of repairing my damaged brain tissue to deal with- what we did there just stopped the virus spreading any further; what's coming up when the TARDIS finishes with it is _really _going to hurt-, but it's nothing major, really," the Doctor said, shrugging slightly as he turned to look at his other self. "Thanks for the help."

"Thanks for remembering I was here," the other Doctor replied, before he turned to look at something behind the Doctor and Martha. "Anyway, I'd best be off; the rest of us are coming back, which means you don't have long until you wake up."

With that, he walked right past the Doctor and Martha, heading for something behind them in the now-sunny 'graveyard'. Martha had just turned around briefly to see eight other figures standing where the Doctors' 'graves' had been earlier- although the 'sunlight' from behind them made it hard to make out anything specific about their appearances-, before the feel of the Doctor's hand on her shoulder prompted her to turn back and look at him as he stared at her, an earnest, hopeful smile on his face.

"Come with me?" he asked, the smile on his face belying his uncertainty.

"Always," Martha replied, taking the offered hand with a warm smile.

Once again, the Doctor stepped up to Martha and kissed her, their arms wrapped around each other so tightly that Martha swore she could feel the Doctor's hearts beating inside his chest…

Then she heard nine voices speaking within her mind-

_**Welcome to our hearts, Martha Jones**_

-and then everything around her was suddenly filled with a brilliant golden light…

* * *

AN: To answer the obvious question, the reason for the Eighth Doctor's presence is that he is intended to symbolise the Doctor's recognition and renewed awareness of the responsibility he possesses as Time's Champion and the Last of the Time Lords; essentially, prior to Martha's arrival the Doctor had 'allowed' his memory of his other selves to 'pass on'- the novel "Timewyrm: Revelations" revealed that the past incarnations of Time Lords live on in their subconscious minds after their regenerations, personifying aspects of their personality- as he gave up on life, but with Martha having convinced him to keep on living, the Doctor acquired a renewed strength, his resolve to live and continue his 'mission' in life allowing his eighth self to return to aid him, the other Doctors coming 'back' as the damage caused by the virus was cured


	5. I Don't Think That They'd Understand

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters you recognise; usual drill

Feedback: Feel free

AN: Sorry about how long it took to get this one out; I had a _lot _that needed to be said and I wanted to be sure it came across the right way

Surrender

As Jack stared at the still forms of the Doctor and Martha lying before him, their faces occasionally twitching slightly as they 'spoke' via the TARDIS, he couldn't help but wonder if this was going to work.

As much as he wanted the Doctor to live- after all the man had done for the universe, it seemed so… _pathetic_… that his death would come about simply because some git in the far future had gotten lucky at the last minute-, he couldn't shake the thought that, if the Doctor didn't _want _to be saved this time around, there wasn't going to be anything they could do for him but make sure that the TARDIS was kept somewhere safe…

Then, even as that thought was crossing his mind, a brilliant golden glow suddenly spread from the telepathic circuits to envelop the Doctor, briefly surrounding the Time Lord's head with a light so intense it almost hurt to look at it- the rest of his body being illuminated by a dimmer glow-, before it faded away, leaving the Doctor and Martha as they had been before.

For a moment, there was nothing but silence- Jack briefly wondered if he'd only imagined the glow-, before the Doctor and Martha's eyes opened, looking at each other with such a sudden, intense passion that even Jack couldn't help but feel like he should look away for a moment before his old instincts reasserted themselves.

"You had an interesting time in there, I take it?" he asked, raising a casual eyebrow as the two of them instantly jolted apart and stood up, exchanging embarrassed glances before they turned to face him.

"Well, y'know, someone in your mind like that…" the Doctor said, shrugging slightly even as the broad grin on his face as he looked at Martha belied the attempted casual tone of his voice.

"Let's just say… things came up that we should have discussed a long time ago," Martha said by way of explanation, the glare she gave Jack making it clear that he was to leave it at that even as the warm smile on her face and the heat in her eyes as she looked at the Doctor gave him more than a few ideas.

Before Jack could say anything further, the door to the main part of the ship opened and Gwen and Ianto entered the console room, their eyes instantly noting the now-conscious Doctor.

"Oh, good; you _are _awake," Gwen said, smiling slightly at the Doctor. "We heard voices, but…"

"Yep, no need to worry about me, Gwen Cooper; _perfectly _fine, I assure you," the Doctor said, smiling broadly at Gwen before he turned to Ianto. "Ianto Jones, I assume? Good to meet you; heard a bit about you from these two but something's always come up to stop me actually dropping in for a visit…"

"Don't worry about it," Ianto said, shaking his head slightly dismissively. "You're there when you need to be there; that's what matters."

"Talking of being where we need to be," Jack put in, looking between the Doctor and Martha with a slight smile as he indicated the TARDIS, "we're still currently in a temporal orbit; do you want us to stop it, or do you want to just leave?"

"Leave?" Gwen asked, looking in surprise at Jack. "But the wedd…"

Her voice trailed off as she noted the Doctor and Martha's current close proximity to each other, and her eyes widened slightly in understanding. "Oh."

"Yeah, I know; not exactly the most… convenient timing, is it?" Martha said, before she turned to look at the Doctor with a mock glare. "And I'm blaming _you _for that, by the way!"

"_Moi_?" the Doctor asked, looking at Martha with a stunned gaze. "What did _I _do?"

"Only materialised the TARDIS in the middle of the church _just _as the ceremony was about to begin-" Martha countered, the grin on her face taking some of the sting out of her words as she stared at the Doctor.

"I just set the TARDIS to take me to where you were at a certain date; is it _my _fault that you never told me _precisely _when everything was-?" the Doctor asked.

"Given you never stuck around-" Martha began again, only to be cut off by Ianto holding up a hand as he looked at the two of them.

"As fascinating as this is, maybe we could get this over with?" he asked, raising an eyebrow pointedly as he indicated the door behind them. "We _do _still have a churchful of wedding guests out there who are probably waiting for an answer about what a police box is doing in the aisle…"

"The old girl landed in the _aisle_?" the Doctor said, looking at Ianto in surprise before he glanced up at the TARDIS, a frustrated smile on his face. "Y'know, I only _meant _you to get me somewhere where you'd be safe…"

"Given that this ship saved your life by arriving where it did, are you _really _going to start complaining?" Gwen asked, a slight smile on her face as she subtly indicated where Martha was even now standing beside the Doctor.

"Good point," the Doctor said, nodding slightly at the former policewoman before he turned his attention back to the controls before him. "Anyway, we'd probably best get out of this temporal orbit and get on the move; anywhere you want me to…"

He paused, looking uncomfortably over at Martha before he spoke again. "Uh… sorry, we'll stop to talk to everyone first; almost forgot that you might want to-"

"It's all right," Martha said, leaning over and giving the Doctor a brief peck on the lips as she smiled reassuringly at him, guessing what had happened; he'd been so momentarily caught up in the moment he'd almost forgotten _why _she was in a church in the first place, and thus would probably want to provide everyone present with at least some kind of explanation. "So you're a bit insanely absent-minded sometimes; you wouldn't be you if you weren't."

As the Doctor looked slightly uncomfortably at her, Martha gave another brief, longer kiss before she pulled back. "You remembered to take what _I _might want into account; that's all I really want."

"Thanks," the Doctor said, briefly looking at her with an expression that Martha could have sworn was embarrassment- when was the last time the Doctor had ever been _embarrassed_ by something he'd done?-, before he turned around and flicked a switch on the TARDIS console. "OK, that's the temporal orbit shut down; time for us to get back to reality."

With that, the TARDIS's current five inhabitants turned around and walked out of the ship, emerging from the already-brighter console room- evidently with the Doctor restored to full health the TARDIS was recovering as well- to return to the church where they'd been mere hours- although for everyone else it had been mere seconds- ago; sometimes the fine details of time travel could be at least slightly confusing to follow- ago, the guests still staring incredulously at the police box as the bride and the guests who'd entered it emerged, along with a previously-unseen fifth individual.

* * *

"Ah, hello everyone; I'm the Doctor," the Doctor said, waving at the assorted people in the church around him, a broad grin on his face as he met their incredulous stares; evidently many of them were wondering how five people could have fitted comfortably inside the TARDIS. "Terribly sorry to drop in like this, but things came up that prevented me from getting here earlier and then I needed some help with something…"

He paused as a sudden thought occurred to him and he glanced back at Martha. "Just how far along were you when I got here anyway?"

"Uh… he'd just started speaking, really," Martha clarified, indicating the priest who currently stood at the other end of the aisle, looking slightly indignantly at the Doctor as though waiting for an opportunity to berate him for interrupting.

"Oh," the Doctor said, looking past the stunned Tom Milligan- evidently guessing who this was from Martha's stories- to address the priest. "Sorry about that; the bit where I'm _supposed _to arrive hasn't happened yet, any chance I could-

"Doctor," Martha said, walking up to him with a slight smile as she placed one finger on his lips to halt him mid-sentence, "forget about doing anything 'properly'; could you just… let me say what I have to say and leave it at that?"

"Oh… right," the Doctor said, nodding in understanding. "Sorry; never could quite know when to shut up, even if some of me were better at it than others…"

Martha couldn't help but note the casual way in which he referenced his previous bodies just then.

_Some of me_…

He'd already lived through _nine _previous bodies, and had who-knew-how-many left to him; she was definitely going to be getting involved with a _very _complicated man…

But then again, if love made sense it wouldn't be love; part of what made it so incredible was that it was so irrational…

"Tom…" Martha said, taking a deep breath as she looked at the man she'd been about to marry, wishing there was an easier way to do this even as she knew that it was no more than she deserved for getting Tom involved in this mess. "The wedding's off."

Martha barely even registered the gasps of shock from around her as she said those words, her mind focused on the ramifications of the decision facing her at present.

She knew that many people would call her crazy for what she was about to do- turning down the man who had actually asked her to _marry_ him over the man who'd spent most of the time they'd initially known each other talking or brooding about his ex-, but it wasn't as simple as that.

Even without the fact that his grief over Rose had comprised such a small part of the incredibly _alive _man he'd always been…

The Doctor might have practically ignored her feelings in the past, but he _had _changed since those days; if Martha knew anything from spending time with the Doctor, it was that nothing remained exactly the same forever.

What she had seen- what she had _felt_- inside his mind- his evident grief at the thought that he'd lost her, the rapid pace of his recovery when she'd admitted how she felt, the eagerness with which he'd responded to her kiss- was enough for her to be certain that the way things had been before would no longer apply.

"I know this is the oldest excuse in the book," she said at last, knowing how contrite and inadequate this was going to sound who those who didn't know about the Doctor- even those who _did _know were looking at her with a mixture of scepticism and satisfaction (Her family had always suspected she'd never entirely gotten over her old feelings for the Time Lord even if they'd been of mixed opinions about them; her mother had never been entirely comfortable with his lifestyle while Leo had commented more than once that he admired what he'd heard about the Doctor's dedication to his goals)-, "but… it's not you, it's _me_. You deserve someone who can love you _totally_… someone who really appreciates you for _you_… and I…"

She sighed slightly, trying to collect her thoughts- she was unable to stop herself from shooting a brief, affectionate gaze at the Doctor, unable to stop the slight jolt in her insides as she saw him gazing back at her the way she'd once seen John Smith gaze at Joan Redfern, the way she'd always privately longed for him to look at her back in the old days during their initial time on the TARDIS- before continuing to address Tom. "Well… I already gave everything to someone else; you… you deserve _so _much more than what I'd be giving you if we went through with this."

In the stunned silence that followed, the guests around her still uncertain what to say- although Martha did note that Tom's mother was glaring at her as though she'd claimed to have grown an extra head; Martha wouldn't be surprised if the woman was wondering what 'that skinny idiot' (She could almost hear her would-have-been mother-in-law's voice thinking those words) had to offer her that Tom didn't-, Martha removed her engagement ring and passed it back to Tom, her almost-husband taking the ring back in silence.

"I'm…" she began, taking a deep breath before she spoke again. "I'm… sorry you got involved in this whole mess; I honestly _did _think I was over it, but then… well, as he said, things happened…"

Looking back at her as she trailed off, uncertain about how to proceed, Tom could only give her a small smile.

"Eh… that's life," he said at last, clearly trying to sound lighter about the current topic than he actually felt. "I guess I should have known you'd… well, get tired of me _eventually_; you need someone who can keep up with you…"

"Oh, trust me; if anything, I'm often trying to keep up with _him_-" Martha began.

"We each challenge each other in different ways, Doctor Milligan," the Doctor cut in, looking at the other man with a slightly sympathetic gaze as he put an arm around Martha, the gentleness of the motion making it clear to all that it was solely to offer Martha comfort rather than an attempt to 'stake his claim' as he addressed Tom. "As Martha said, I'm… well, I'm sorry you got dragged into this; you didn't deserve to get caught up in this mess I made."

Tom merely nodded in response to the Doctor's comment, both men fully aware that, in a situation like this, words wouldn't help anything apart from making the situation even more awkward than it was.

Even without speaking, however, as the Doctor and Tom Milligan looked at each other in that brief moment, a brief, silent communication passed between them, one that Martha somehow knew included Tom vowing that he would find the Doctor if he hurt Martha again and the Doctor confirming that he would deserve anything Tom did to him if that scenario ever took place, even as he vowed that it never would

"Well… bye?" the Doctor said at last after a momentary awkward pause, looking around at the rest of the people in the church with an uncomfortable smile. Before anyone could say anything- none of the people gathered around the TARDIS were kidding themselves into thinking that they'd have something pleasant to say anyway- the Doctor and Martha turned around and walked back into the TARDIS, the police box subsequently dematerialising to leave the Torchwood team standing around the area where it had once been.

* * *

"Get the retcon," Jack muttered after a moment's reflective pause, turning to look at Ianto and Gwen as the rest of the people in the church- with the obvious exceptions of Martha's family, who were simply exchanging slight smiles with each other- stood up and began to ask each other questions about what had just taken place, the TARDIS's disappearance essentially breaking the brief 'spell' of silence the mystery of its presence had imposed upon the church. "I think I can safely say that practically _nobody _here wants to remember a _police box _interrupting the wedding, even _without _the fact that it took the bride away…"

"Check," Ianto said, already making mental notes about how much retcon would be required for a crowd this large even as some of the nearest guests began to turn and look pointedly at the three people remaining in the room, evidently guessing that they were the only ones here who might have any answers for what had just taken place.

This wasn't going to be the easiest retconning the Torchwood team had ever attempted, but if it gave the Doctor and Martha a chance to start their new life together peacefully…

Jack wasn't going to start complaining about the logistics of things; after everything the Doctor and Martha had gone through since he'd known them, he figured they deserved a little happiness for once (To say nothing of as few reasons to dig up old wounds as possible; they could patch up their old issues regarding the Doctor's attitude back when Martha first travelled with him in their own time).


	6. I Just Want You To Know Who I Am

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters you recognise; usual drill

Feedback: Feel free

AN: This and its predecessor were originally one chapter, but I thought that it was getting too long and decided to split it up after the wedding; hope you appreciate it anyway (And I apologise to whom it may concern for the rating increase; I just felt that there are some things which work better when described in detail)

Surrender

As the TARDIS central column began to move, the Doctor turned to look at Martha with a casual flourish, his broad grin giving no indication that he had been close to death only a few minutes ago as he leaned casually against the console.

"So, Doctor Jones, where to now?" he asked, indicating the controls with a brief wave of his hand. "We've still got a few possibilities to check out; I've been meaning to pay a return visit to Peladon for a while now- lovely place, really; great culture and charming people-, or we could stop in at the Tempus Fugit on Pella Satyrnis for a quick snack, or…"

His voice trailed off as he took in Martha's gaze as she stared at him, a teasing, seductive smile on her face as she stared at him, already reaching up with one hand to shrug off the veil and toss it aside as she looked at him.

She knew that it was probably more than slightly fast, but she couldn't help it; after having resigned herself to the idea that this was never going to happen- coupled with all the issues they'd had to overcome to reach this point-, Martha felt as though she wasn't prepared to wait any long for what she'd wanted- albeit in varying degrees- almost since the moment they'd stepped out onto the balcony to look at the moon's surface back at the Royal Hope all those years ago.

They'd spent the last couple of years getting to know each other as friends, experiencing more wonder and adventure than most people ever experienced in their entire lives, relying on each other to accomplish the virtually impossible more than once, and after the little 'trip' into the Doctor's mind, it seemed safe to say that both of them already knew things about each other's lives that they'd never told anyone else.

Getting to know each other more as lovers rather than friends could wait; right now, as Martha walked over, took the Doctor's face in her hands like he had done for hers all those long years ago on the moon, and pulled him down to kiss her, the almost electric jolt of pleasure and joy that she felt as the Time Lord's lips met hers ended any thought of waiting any longer…

At least until the Doctor pulled back, looking at Martha with an anxious expression.

"Is this _really_…?" the Doctor began uncertainly, indicating the console room with a wave of his hand.

"Trust me, Doctor," Martha said, smiling reassuring at him. "I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't _want _to do it; you aren't forcing me into _anything_."

"Well… glad to hear that, but… _here_?" the Doctor asked, indicating the room around them once again as he looked at Martha, clearly trying to make sure she knew what she was doing. "It's not exactly-"

"Oh, just call it a little… fantasy I used to have, really," Martha said, smiling slightly shyly at the Doctor before she glanced down at herself. "Admittedly, I never expected it would happen in _this_, but there was just something so… _interesting_ about the idea…"

"Really?" the Doctor asked, looking at Martha with a slightly teasing smile of his own, his initial concerns pushed aside by her words. "And… what _were _you expecting to be wearing in this fantasy of yours… might I ask?"

"Later," Martha said briefly, before cutting off any further conversation as she reached up and resumed where they'd left off, Martha gradually urging the Doctor to move back towards the TARDIS console just behind him… his back was up against the console edge…

"Just a mo," the Doctor said, pulling back from Martha for a moment to lean over and tweak a switch on the console before returning his gaze to her. "Just locked the controls for a moment; until I next hit that switch- and that's only if I touch it _on purpose_-, the TARDIS won't respond to any of the other controls."

"Good," Martha said, before her lips met the Doctor's once again, the two remaining standing for only a few moments before Martha pushed him slightly backwards, sending the Doctor falling backwards slightly to land on the console, Martha subsequently leaning over and resuming where she'd left off.

After a few moments where their actions failed to progress further than some rather intense making out, however, Martha pulled back once again to look at the Doctor as he lay beneath her, the grin on his face fading slightly as he looked back at her

"You know," she said, trying to put a slightly teasing tone in her voice, "I'd like to feel I'm not the _only _one interested in this here…"

"Yeah… look I'm sorry about that, it's just that… well, it's… been a while… since I did… _this_," the Doctor said, looking slightly uncomfortably up at the ceiling.

"Oh, come on; how long _could _it have been for someone like you?" Martha asked, smiling slightly teasingly at him. "A couple of years? A decade?"

"Around two centuries," the Doctor replied.

"…give or take a decade or two, and if it counts when we didn't go all the way, and _she _was the one who initiated it; I just… didn't feel right turning her down after everything I'd put her through recently- was a lot more emotional in that body, especially since I'd only recently regenerated-, wasn't certain how to react without causing offence, and…" he continued, looking increasingly uncomfortable as he looked awkwardly around the console room as Martha stared incredulously at him.

"Two… _centuries_?" she repeated, her eyes wide at the implications. "You mean… you and Rose…?"

"Not even once," the Doctor replied, shaking his head as he looked back at Martha, his discomfort apparently pushed aside in favour of assuring Martha of this particular detail. "The only times we even _kissed _were when Rose was possessed by something else- two long stories that _really _aren't worth getting into-, and I was never clear on if she even _remembered _them afterwards…"

He took a deep breath, shaking his head slightly to push those thoughts aside before he fixed his gaze on Martha. "The point is, I haven't done… _this_… for a while, and I haven't _initiated _it in even longer- think the last time was back in the Academy, really; just… never felt the urge after I left Gallifrey-, so… well, if I'm not…"

"Doctor," Martha said, smiling at him pointedly as she took a couple of steps forward to stand in front of him; his habit of talking a lot could be endearing in the right circumstances, but right now she wanted his attention focused on the present (He'd spent _far _too long the first time around hiding in the past for her tastes). "Stop worrying so much, and just… _go with it_."

With that, she grabbed the Doctor's head and pulled him down to meet her lips once again, Martha's hands quickly moving to shrug the Doctor's jacket off his shoulders before tugging off his tie, all the while making sure to maintain contact between their lips; after waiting so long for this moment- even after convincing herself she'd given up on experiencing it for real-, Martha didn't intend to waste a second of it.

For a few moments, the Doctor's confidence seemingly growing with each passing moment as his kisses became harder and more passionate against her lips, his hands beginning to roam over her body, the two were content to simply continue what they were doing, lips caressing each other with a random combination of gentleness and force as they pressed against the console, occasionally rolling over slightly to allow the other to be 'on top' for a moment, before the Doctor pulled back to look pointedly at Martha, who only realised after glancing down that she'd opened his shirt without realising it.

"Would I be incorrect in assuming we have a _slight _clothing inequality issue here?" he asked, looking at Martha's still-intact dress with that same teasing grin that had more than once made Martha want to pin him to the wall and practically devour him; that twinkle he got in his eye when he was joking was something she'd always found _very _appealing…

"Point," she admitted, pushing him slightly off her so that she could stand up and turn around, exposing the dress's zip to the Doctor's view.

"If you wouldn't mind…?" she asked, turning her head slightly to look at the Doctor as she indicated the zip. The Doctor's eyes widened slightly at the suggestion, but then a broad grin spread across his face and he walked over to stand behind her, one hand taking the zip and pulling it down while the other one slid in under the fabric to begin stroking her back, gradually moving around to lightly stroke her ribcage.

These were the hands of the man who had destroyed his own homeworld, but Martha gave no thought to that, secure in the knowledge that the Doctor would never hurt her; even when he had only seen her as a friend, ignoring her attempts for more, she had always known that she could always count on him to protect her when she needed him.

Even if safety wasn't something that could ever be guaranteed in a life with the Doctor, Martha knew that his love and dedication to her were two things would always be there for her, doing everything they could to ensure that she never came to harm while she was with him-

Then his hand slid around her waist under her now-undone dress to drop down between her legs, and Martha temporarily forgot how to think.

"Oh, _God_…" she groaned, leaning her head back and moaning as the Doctor's fingers moved inside her, his mouth moving down to kiss her shoulder at the same time; Martha suddenly had a renewed appreciation for her choice of dress, given that it had allowed the Doctor immediate access to her shoulder and neck as his fingers continued their work.

"No, just me," the Doctor said, his voice low as he spoke in her ear, pausing briefly in his kisses before continuing his near-worship of her neck, kissing his way along her pulse before nibbling lightly on her earlobe, his hand continuing its exploration between her legs as the other moved to free her arms from the sleeves of her dress.

As one arm finally came free of the material Martha suddenly couldn't bear the feel of any longer- she'd loved the comfort the dress offered when she'd first worn it but she was rapidly changing her opinion of it-, she quickly moved her now-bare arm to tug the other sleeve off, trying not to disturb the Doctor's other hand as it moved to her breast, gently caressing and teasing it as he continued-

"Oh, _God_!" Martha yelled, throwing her head back as she felt her first orgasm tear through her, the Doctor's arms the only thing allowing her to remain standing as she trembled and shook her way through the wave of ecstasy that seemed almost determined to overwhelm her before she finally calmed.

"Oh… God…" Martha whispered, her voice nearly incredulous as she turned her head to look at the Doctor as he stood behind her, grinning back at her as she regained some degree of focus. "Where did you learn to do _that_?"

"Picked it up at the Academy when I was younger," the Doctor replied nonchalantly, the slightly smug smile on his face making it clear that he knew just what kind of effect he'd had on her. "Might not have done it much since then, but some things you _never _forget."

"Campus hottie, eh?" Martha asked, smiling slightly teasingly at the Doctor- given his age there was definitely no reason to be jealous of him talking about people he'd slept with as a student, even if they _weren't _almost certainlydead after the Time War- even as she wondered how she could laugh like this when she was topless and the Doctor was standing there with his shirt hanging open…

"Weeell, more the kind of maverick the girls wanted to spend time with just to show how 'different' they were- never really paid off on either end; they were too essentially Gallifreyian and I was too essentially _me_ for it to last-, but-" the Doctor began, only for Martha to grab his shirt and pull him towards her before he could continue, both moaning as their bare chests met for the first time as they kissed again.

"Enough talk," Martha practically growled after pulling back from the Doctor for oxygen, moving her hands to his trousers even as she spoke. "Get these off, _now_."

"Gotcha," the Doctor replied, his own hands moving to where her dress remained loosely hanging around her hips, both of them gripping the other's only remaining clothing (Martha vaguely noted that the Doctor had already kicked off his shoes at some point, but right now her mind had more immediate matters to focus on) and shoving them down mere moments before Martha found herself wrapped in the Doctor's arms and pinned to the control console, nearly overwhelmed at the sudden feel of him inside her before she'd even had a chance to see him completely.

As she felt her peak approaching, Martha vaguely registered the Doctor suddenly place one hand against the right side of her face even as he continued to move deeper and deeper into her, waves of pleasure washing over her body…

"DOCTOR!" she yelled, her mind suddenly overwhelmed by a burst of pleasure so intense it felt like everything around her vanished…

* * *

Opening her eyes, Martha found herself standing on top of a large, snow-capped mountain- dressed in her red leather jacket and dark trousers-, staring out at a vast alien city contained in what appeared to be a massive forcefield, silver-leafed trees gathered the field's edges at the bottom of the mountain. Despite the snow around her, the twin suns in the orange sky gave the world around her a feeling of intense warmth and comfort, soothing without being uncomfortable, and the vast city before her only further increased her awe at the sight; the central tower seemed to stretch up into the sky to tower above even the clouds around it, the brilliant architecture giving the impression that it had almost been grown rather than built…

"Gallifrey," the Doctor's voice said; glancing behind her, Martha saw him standing behind her, once again dressed in his brown suit and jacket, an expression of such love and desire on his face as he looked at her- she'd never expected to see even _one _of those directed at her, never mind _both­_- that Martha was briefly tempted to pin him to the ground to continue what they'd started…

Then what he'd just said to her registered, and Martha's eyes widened in shock.

"_Gallifrey_?" she repeated incredulously, staring with renewed intensity at the landscape before her. "But… oh," she began, pausing in realisation as she remembered where she'd been only minutes before. "We're… back in your mind?"

"Oh, when I'm conscious I can engage in a telepathic link like this with another person if I want; I just… don't often like to reveal myself to _this _extent," the Doctor explained, looking at Martha with a slightly apprehensive expression. "It's just… well, if we're going to do this properly… there are a few people you should meet."

Before Martha could ask him what he meant by that, the Doctor had stepped back slightly, and then she saw nine different men gradually emerging from the air around him; a tall man with close-cropped hair and big ears in a leather jacket… the Doctor who'd appeared to them earlier… a little man in a straw hat and question-mark-covered sleeveless pullover with an umbrella… a tall, slightly overweight man with thick curly straw-coloured hair in a coat that seemed to have been made by a colour-blind man with minimal sense of touch… a young man in a cricket jumper and a beige coat with a stick of celery pinned to the lapel… a tall man with thick brown hair and a big coat with a long scarf Martha vaguely recognised from the TARDIS wardrobe… an older man with white hair in blue velvet and a frilled shirt… a short man with a thick head of black hair in a pudding-bowl-style haircut and trousers and a shirt and trousers that seemed at least two sizes too big… an old man with long white hair dressed in Victorian-style clothing…

"You're… _all _the Doctor?" she asked, staring slightly incredulously at the men before her; even recalling how different the Master had looked in his 'Professor Yana' and 'Mr Saxon' incarnations, the idea that all of the men before her were the Doctor was almost too much to believe…

Then she took in the strange gleam in their eyes- a unique combination of enthusiasm and experience that Martha had only truly seen in one man- and knew that she was right; the men before her _were _the Doctor.

"Yep," the Doctor confirmed, smiling at Martha as he indicated his other selves with a sweep of his hand, before his expression resumed its initially apprehensive aspect. "And… well, they're here because…"

"To put it simply, we wanted to take this opportunity to introduce ourselves to you properly, and also to apologise for how we treated you before", the Doctor in the cricket outfit said, shooting a brief glare over at the Doctor before he returned his gaze to Martha.

"You see," the little man with the Beatles-style haircut said, shrugging slightly, a somewhat jovial tone in his voice that belied the seriousness of his expression, "even after everything we've seen over our travels, we're a bit… well, when it comes to emotional matters, we're not that bright."

"Sometimes we found it easier to run from what we're feeling than to face up to it directly," the Doctor in the bad coat continued, his tone grim as he spoke. "We were never entirely comfortable with sharing… _that_… with anyone… but it just became more awkward after we remembered the Time War."

"The fact that we were _all _that remained of our people was something we just… didn't know _how_ to cope with," the short Doctor with the umbrella explained, staring slightly wistfully upwards at nothing in particular. "We even thought about not travelling with _anyone _after that because we didn't feel it was right to expect someone else to deal with it. Miss Tyler joining us just… _happened_, really; we ran into her while dealing with a Nestene invasion and she just… 'forced', for lack of a better term… her way into our lives before we felt we could legitimately object to her presence."

"Even when we started travelling with Rose, we tended to stay on the go rather than actually _talk _about anything," the Doctor in green velvet explained, looking at Martha with a renewed appreciation as he spoke. "We only even told Rose what our species was after she actually asked us what we were in the middle of an argument, and everything else we kept to ourselves; she never asked the uncomfortable questions- what our planet was called, what it was like, what our people were like-, and were satisfied with that."

"But you…" the hobo-like Doctor said, looking at her with a wistful expression. "From the moment we began to travel with you, you made us confront things we needed to deal with; our grief over the loss of Gallifrey… the knowledge that we were the last of the Time Lords… the responsibility that we had as the last of our people…"

He smiled at her as he spoke, the other Doctors smiling at her as well. "You made us face up to the memories when we were content to hide away from them, and encouraged us to do what we had to do by facing our pain and talking it over… not because you _had _to know, but because you _wanted _to know."

"And we are _extremely _grateful for that, Martha," the Doctor in the scarf added, smiling warmly at her before his expression became more sombre (For a moment Martha could almost swear that his clothing changed to a darker red colour than it had been originally, but pushed that thought aside as it returned to normal). "We might not have always shown it, but we _were _grateful to you for helping us open up while you were with us; we were just… uncertain about showing it."

"In some ways," the Doctor in the cricket outfit explained, looking slightly uncomfortable as he spoke, "as much as we were grateful to you for helping us, it was… _easier _to hide behind past pain than create opportunities to leave ourselves open to the possibility of further suffering in the future; we were simply so caught up in our own fear that we never really took time to consider how you might react to our actions."

"We might be more expressive than other Time Lords- a bunch of emotional stick-in-the-muds, really; when you can live as long as we do so few people really felt the _need _to look for attachment any more-, but we still never really learned _how _to do it," the Doctor in the scarf explained, staring upwards with an expression that somehow combined wistfulness with contempt, as though a part of him wished he could have been like the other Time Lords even as he recognised that he was better being what he was.

"For all that we were so much more… _human_… than our people," the white-haired Doctor in the frilled shirt continued, "we were still Time Lords back when we were… well, _us_- the young fellow we are right now is the first time we've felt _truly _human in that regard-; we were comfortable enough assuming a role as teachers or parental figures to those we travelled with, but anything further…"

"We never felt entirely comfortable going _that _far, to be honest," the short Doctor with the umbrella said. "Even when I spent three months as a human, I _still_ didn't quite get it at the end-"

"Hold on; _you _were human?" Martha cut in, looking incredulously between the Doctor she knew and the one who'd just spoken. "But…?"

"Oh, he tried being human for a few months to get a better insight into how a friend felt after someone she… cared about… died," the Doctor explained, looking slightly uncomfortably at Martha and his other self. "I suppose I should have learned my lesson then for when _we_ did… _that_… but I was so rushed for time the possibility that I'd repeat myself _that _much never occurred to me…"

"Plus, the division between you and Smith was less significant than the one between _me _and Smith; you forgot to take the era you were hiding in into account," the Doctor in the straw hat added, before he turned to look apologetically over at Martha. "While 'my' version of John Smith was significantly different from who I am as myself, _his _Smith… for all his faults, the John Smith you knew _did _care about you; it was just that he was a product of his time- or, at least, the time the TARDIS selected for him-, and so, with Joan… practically _forcing _herself and her attentions on him… it was… easier… for Smith to focus on her than to consciously think about you in _that _regard."

Martha wasn't entirely sure how to feel about that; even the implication that the Doctor might have felt… _something _for her when he was John Smith raised more than a few questions she wasn't entirely sure how to deal with.

"It doesn't excuse anything, of course," the man in the leather jacket added, looking over at Martha with a brief apologetic shrug. "We just want you to know that… in the end… where it counts… you _always _had our hearts; we just… weren't comfortable sharing that kind of thing with _anyone _and… thought it'd be best to leave it…"

"The point of this is, we might be a bit of a fool when it comes down to it," the old man added, smiling slightly at her as he spoke, "but we can assure you that, from this point onwards, whatever fate might befall us in the past, present or future… for as long as you want them, our hearts are yours."

"We know we were an insensitive fool back when you first met us," the Doctor in the multi-coloured coat put in, "but we are truly sorry about that, and wish to assure you that we never _meant _to hurt you; we just…"

He sighed in frustration. "Well, in the end, we… didn't know _how _to really cope with what we felt for you; it was easier to keep you at arm's length than put ourselves in a position to be hurt when you left…"

For a moment there was only silence, the Doctors waiting for Martha's response while she contemplated what they had just said to her, before the UNIT medical officer spoke at last.

"Don't worry about it," she said, smiling reassuring at the Doctor she knew; she wasn't denying that the Doctor's actions back then had hurt her, but if she couldn't move on from the past in a time machine, where _could _she go to move on?

"It… _did _hurt at the time," she admitted, nodding slightly at the Doctor in the bad coat, "but there were the good moments too; it's not like you ever _hated _me- we definitely had our fun times back then-, you just… well, never wanted it to go further."

She shrugged slightly. "Besides, I enjoyed the break from university, really; after spending the last few years working practically non-stop on the exams, it was rather nice to be able to take time off without worrying about missing anything."

"And you certainly caught up with anything you might have missed out on afterwards; according to UNIT records you were top of your class after you graduated," the white-haired Doctor in velvet added, smiling warmly at her.

"You looked at that?" Martha asked, looking over sharply at 'her' Doctor.

"Well, y'know, just wanted to check up on you after you left, make sure everything was all right, that kind of thing…" the Doctor admitted, scratching the back of his neck- an action Martha only now realised the white-haired velvet-clad Doctor was doing himself- as he looked upwards uncomfortably before Martha walked over and kissed him briefly once again.

"Thanks," she said, smiling warmly at him as she pulled back. "Not exactly the way I'd have _wanted _you to find that out- you could have just _asked_-, but I appreciate that you cared enough to want to know."

"And… the rest of it?" the Doctor in the cricket outfit asked, looking urgently at Martha. "Do you… forgive us?"

After staring silently at the ten faces before her, Martha nodded.

"Yeah…" she said at last, smiling briefly at them. "It's… I'm not saying it's all behind us, but…"

"You're willing to give us a chance," the Doctor she'd met earlier said, smiling gratefully at her. "That's all we really want; if you're willing to give us a chance, we'll make sure we do everything we can to deserve it."

With that, there was a brief moment when everything went black…

* * *

And then, as Martha opened her eyes, she was back in the console room once again, the Doctor's hand still pressed against her face as he remained inside her, a casual smile on his face as he looked at her.

"Wow…" she whispered, staring back at him in awe at what she'd just experienced. "That was… was…"

"Intense?" the Doctor asked, smiling back at her curiously.

"Yeah…" Martha said, nodding briefly back at him before she looked uncertainly at him. "Uh… don't take this the wrong way, but… is that link _always _going to be like that? I mean, it was _great_, don't get me wrong, but it's just…"

"A bit much for a regular thing?" the Doctor asked, shrugging casually as he looked reassuring at her. "Oh, don't worry, I'm not going to make a habit of that; it was only because I…"

He paused for a moment, clearly trying to think of the best way to phrase what he was about to say, before he continued. "Well, I wanted you to meet them… and… well, I've never been great at the whole 'talking about my feelings' thing when it's just me… never sure if I won't make an idiot of myself or say the wrong thing somehow…"

"And you thought you might have better luck at doing it when the majority of people present _are _you and you don't have to risk _completely _embarrassing yourself, huh?" Martha asked, a teasing smile on her face as she looked at the Doctor, leaning over to briefly brush her lips against his before pulling back to smile at him. "You're cute when you're uncomfortable, you know that?"

"Is that a good thing?" the Doctor asked, only the earnest look in his eyes displaying how urgently he needed to know the answer to that question.

"I'm still here, aren't I?" Martha replied, chuckling slightly as she looked at him with an amused grin. "I'm not saying you're not going to have to do some _serious _grovelling to make up for some of your behaviour back then… but in the end, you were there when you had to be, and I wouldn't be here if I didn't _want _to be, got me?"

The Doctor smiled.

"Understood," he replied, before he raised a casual eyebrow as he looked at her. "So… how'd I do?"

Martha couldn't help but chuckle slightly at the slight anxiety in the Doctor's eyes; even after her reaction, he was _still _evidently slightly insecure about his 'abilities' after so long…

"Well, can't say I have _much _to complain about if that's your average performance ability," she said, smiling seductively back at the Doctor. "However, as pleasant as this was, shall we continue this somewhere more… comfortable… so that I can conduct further 'research' into this?"

The Doctor smiled.

"Well, I could definitely go for _that_," he said, reaching to take her hand as he pulled her towards him for another brief, passionate kiss before picking her up bridal-style and carrying her deeper into the TARDIS, neither of them concerned for the clothing they were leaving behind them as the TARDIS continued to hover in the vortex.

The universe outside could wait; for the moment, after nearly losing each other for good- albeit in different ways-, all that mattered was reaffirming the start of their new life together.

* * *

AN 2: Bonus points to anyone who identifies the song lyrics where the chapter titles came from!


End file.
